Shape Study of Wear Debris in Oil-Lubricated System with Neural Network

The wear debris is fall off the moving surfaces in oil-lubricated systems and its morphology is directly related to the damage and failure to the interacting surfaces. The morphology of the wear particles are therefore directly indicative of wear processes occurring in tribological system. The computer image processing and artificial neural network was applied to shape study and identify wear debris generated from the lubricated moving system. In order to describe the characteristics of various wear particles, four representative parameter (50％ volumetric diameter, aspect, roundness and reflectivity) from computer image analysis for groups of randomly sampled wear particles, are used as inputs to the network and learned the friction condition of five values (material 3, applied load 1, sliding distance 1). It is shown that identification results depend on the ranges of these shape parameters learned. The three kinds of the wear debris had a different pattern characteristics and recognized the friction condition and materials very well by neural network. We discuss how these approach can be applied to condition diagnosis of the oil-lubricated tribological system.