Surface degradation monitoring in mechanical contacts

The research in this doctoral opportunity will experimentally quantify the multi contact wear in mechanical contacts using acoustics emission under lubricated and dry conditions.

Acoustic noise and wear phenomena are inevitable in machine components even working in normal operational conditions. Surface degradation, at the mechanical contacts due to wear, has an impact on the noise emitted because of the rapid release of energy from localized sources within a material. Severity of surface degradation can change the acoustic spectrum, and hence an analysis of emitted noise can lead to the possible health diagnosis of machine components.
Academic researchers have shown the possibility of the trend modelling between noise signals and the wear in terms of accumulated signal energy and changes in spectrum amplitude. However, analysis of acoustic noise for the wear quantification is still not available and requires an in-depth study. In this work, experiments will be designed and performed to identify the effectiveness of the acoustic noise for the quantification of wear in a mechanical component with multiple contacts.