Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : November 30, 2017 - December 01, 2017
In this study, the applicability of the nonlinear piezoelectric impedance modulation technique is preliminarily discussed as a methodology of in-service monitoring of the meshing condition of mating spur gears. In the conventional approaches of the gear condition monitoring, vibration-based methodologies have been intensively studied and already commercialized because of the advantages of their simplicity. It is, however, hard to apply these approaches to the condition monitoring of low-speed gears because they are based on the detection of the impulsive response of the gear induced by a damaged tooth. The goal of this study is to develop more direct and active approach to the condition monitoring of 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 electro-mechanical coupling admittance of the piezoelectric actuator is measured to evaluate the sensitivity of the natural frequencies of the gear in the high-frequency range to the rotation angle and the change of the transfer torque under a static meshing condition. Discussions are made by comparing the experimental results with a finite element analysis.
