An online debris sensor system with vibration resistance for lubrication analysis

The health condition of the lubricated systems can be directly indicated by the concentration and material type of the abrasive particles, which may provide very early warnings of faults/failures and benefit the condition based maintenance. Oil debris particle detecting techniques are thus important for machinery condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. This work proposes a new structure of online debris sensor (ODS), which applies the radial magnetic field, different from the traditional axial magnetic field. The designed ODS can effectively reduce the interferences of the background noise and the vibration of the machine in operation. Moreover, in order to optimally determine the number of turns of an inductive coil and the current of the drive coils, two methods are developed respectively in this work which can ensure sensitivity and anti-vibration features of the ODS. The instrumentation circuit system for detecting debris particles and sensing signals has been also designed to extract and to record the signatures of particles. The designed ODS device is then applied to analyze micro debris particles in the lubricating system on a test rig. Experimental results have demonstrated that ODS can successfully detect the 120 μm(H) ferrous particles and 500 μm(H) non-ferrous particles under vibration conditions.