Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Ball Screw Under Time-Varying Conditions With Limited Data

Ball screws play a significant role in maintaining transmission accuracy and stability. Accurate prediction of the remaining useful life (RUL) for the ball screw can provide reliable decision-making information for predictive maintenance. However, the RUL prediction of ball screws with the precision indicator under time-varying operating conditions (OCs) is rarely involved. Moreover, obtaining data for the whole life cycle of each OC is impractical due to time and expenditure constraints. To address the aforementioned issues, this article proposes a hybrid approach for RUL prediction under time-varying OCs. First, a time-varying stochastic model considering the precision indicator is established. Then, the data-driven algorithm is proposed to estimate the unknown parameters with limited data. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method in prognostics is experimentally validated through the designed platform and compared with the commonly used methods.