Abstract
Acoustic Emission (AE) measurement has been long established as a sensitive tool for detecting damage and failure in engineering structures, where sensors are used to detect the elastic stress waves originating from crack growth, impact damage, plastic deformation and other failure mechanisms. This paper examines the sensitivity of AE to mixed lubrication conditions, in order to evaluate the technique for monitoring heavily loaded power transmission gear systems where roughness scale fatigue phenomena such as micro-pitting are a problem. Experiments were conducted using a power-recirculating twin disc rig designed to investigate elastohydrodynamic contacts. Speed and temperature were varied in order to instigate a range of lubrication conditions from full film to heavily mixed lubrication. The AE was found to be precisely dependent on the level of asperity contact and a general relationship between AE and the specific film thickness was determined for these results.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by EPSRC Grant Reference EP/L021757/1. This paper was presented at CMMNO2018 with support from the Peter Jost Travel Fund.
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Hutt, S.M., Clarke, A., Pullin, R., Evans, H.P. (2019). Characterising the Acoustic Emission from a Simulated Gear Contact in Mixed Lubrication Conditions. In: Fernandez Del Rincon, A., Viadero Rueda, F., Chaari, F., Zimroz, R., Haddar, M. (eds) Advances in Condition Monitoring of Machinery in Non-Stationary Operations. CMMNO 2018. Applied Condition Monitoring, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11220-2_41
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