Establishing Statistical Correlation Between Sensor Signature Features and Lubricant Solid Particle Contamination in a Spur Gearbox

This paper aims to predict the severity of solid particle contaminants present in the lubricant in a Spur Gearbox using Vibration, Acoustic Emission, and Sound Signature features. Sensor signatures are acquired at various contaminant conditions of lubricant with different speed and load conditions. Statistical Features are extracted in the time domain, and feature ranking is carried out using the analysis of variance approach. Statistical models are developed using the selected features of Sound, Acoustic Emission, and vibration separately and fusing the features in the feature level. Decision Trees and Support Vector Machine algorithms are used in this study to build statistical models. AE features have a good correlation with lubricant conditions compared to sound and vibration features. The feature-level fusion approach predicts the lubricant conditions with more than 99% accuracy. The feature-level fusion models built using dominant features are computationally efficient without compromising the prediction ability.