Research and development of on-line visual ferrography wear monitoring system for engine bench tests

In order to realize real-time wear monitoring of engine bench tests, on-line visual ferrography (OLVF) module was applied to develop on-line wear monitoring system for engine bench tests and a monitoring software was developed on the Windows XPE platform by using Visual C#. With which the real-time images in the channel of OLVF module were captured and the index of particle covered area (IPCA) of ferrograms was adopted to plot wear trend curves. The practical test was conducted by utilizing the monitoring system on a diesel engine bench. The experimental results show that the system can run stabily and reliably and the invalid data ratio is only 0.3%. A large particle (IPCA=912) was captured before occurrence of scuffing and abnormal wear signals. The system can achieve real-time wear monitoring and early fault warning for engine bench tests.