抄録
In this paper, the applicability of the nonlinear piezoelectric impedance modulation technique is preliminarily discussed as a methodology for in-service monitoring of the meshing condition of mating spur gears. In the conventional approaches to the gear condition monitoring, vibration-based methodologies have been intensively studied and even commercialized because of the advantages of their simplicity. It is, however, still hard to detect the failures in the early stage and to discriminate the damaged gear out of several pairs of gears working simultaneously because they merely provide indirect information about the failure. The goal of this study is to develop more direct approach to the evaluation of the gear teeth meshing. To this end, an ultrasonic elastic wave-based techniques and the concept of smart structures are introduced. In this paper, a piezoelectric wafer actuator is attached to the end face of the target gear, and the nonlinear piezoelectric impedance modulation method is applied. This technique, originally developed as a nondestructive evaluation and structural health monitoring methodology, can characterize the changes of contacting surfaces by measuring the electro-mechanical coupling impedance of the piezoelectric actuator. The applicability of this method is evaluated in the static meshing, in terms of the sensitivity to the change of the rotation angle and the transfer torque.
