A novel gear fatigue monitoring indicator and its application to remaining useful life prediction for spur gear in intelligent manufacturing systems

With the material degradation of gear over its service lifespan, the gearbox is prone to fatigue, especially under harsh working environments. The interaction between gear fatigue and gear dynamics often results in high complexity measurements. This poses significant challenges to developing effective vibration-based techniques to monitor the gear fatigue propagation and predict its remaining useful life (RUL). To address this issue, a novel transmission error-based indicator is proposed to assess the fatigue severity, and then it is utilized to predict the RUL of the gearbox. The effectiveness of the proposed prognostic methodology is validated using endurance tests.