Assessment of Condition Diagnosis System for Axles with Ferrous Particle Sensor

This study presents a condition diagnosis system based on a ferrous particle sensor to estimate the durability of axles in construction equipment. Axles are mechanical devices that play the role of the differential gear in construction equipment that move with wheels and require high reliability. In the durability testing of new axles, failure identification and real-time diagnosis are required. One of the typical failure modes of an axle is increased ferrous-wear particles due to metal-to-metal contact. Therefore, a condition diagnostic program based on the ferrous particle sensor is developed and applied in the bench tests of axles. This program provides information on the amount of wear with respect to ferrous particles using a simple diagnostic algorithm. Additionally, it allows separation and storage of measured data that exceed the reference values; the system provides warnings using color, sound, and pop-up windows to facilitate diagnosis. In the two tests, the first case detected a failure, but in the other case, the sensor did not detect it even though a failure occurred. From the results of bench tests, it is confirmed that the sensor location is a critical factor. Therefore, a multi-physics-based analysis method is suggested for positioning the ferrous particle sensor.