Machinery monitoring

Grant Number: CMMI No. 0968736

Name: A High Throughput Microfluidic Sensor for Real Time Health Monitoring of Rotating Machinery

Start Date: July 1st, 2010

Investigator(s): Jiang Zhe (Principal Investigator)

Robert Veillette (Co-Principal Investigator)

Joan Carletta (Co-Principal Investigator)

Abstract

Condition monitoring has become essential in maintaining and extending the machines’ life cycle and minimizing the maintenance costs of high-speed rotating and reciprocating machinery used in today’s transportation, manufacturing and defense industries. An effective approach to detect signs of potential machine failure is to examine the wear debris in the lubrication oil of a rotating or reciprocating machine. With the funding from National Science Foundation, researchers at University of Akron have successfully demonstrated a multiplexed multichannel inductive pulse wear debris sensing technology that can not only detect metallic debris as small as 30µm in lubricant, but also differentiate ferrous and nonferrous debris. While 20-50 µm wear debris are typically generated when the abnormal wear begins, and many mechanical components (bearings, gearboxes, etc.) have nonferrous surface coating, the sensor can monitoring the wear conditions of a machine from onset, and provide warnings to avoid the possibility of catastrophic component failure during operation. A particle separator was invented, which allows separation of debris particle by size and delivery of sorted debris to corresponding sensing channels, which improved the sensitivity. A novel resonance frequency division signal multiplexing technology was invented and applied to the multiple sensing channels of the sensor, which enabled parallel detection of wear debris with only one set of detection electronics. With the NSF support, we demonstrated the sensor can detect wear debris as small as 30 microns, at a flow rate of 200ml/min in real time (high throughput) in a laboratory test rig. With the above capabilities the device can be used in the bypass of a machine’s lubrication system for online health monitoring of a variety of rotary and reciprocal machines. The developed wear debris sensing technology based on inductive pulse sensing is expected to have broad impact on condition monitoring for rotating and reciprocating machinery.

In terms of education and outreach, the research activities were highly multi-disciplinary, involving microfluidics, MEMS, sensors, multiplexing and signal processing, and provided educational experiences for the students and faculty members involved in the project. During the project, three undergraduate students participated in the research. On high school student was involved in the research activities, who chose engineering as his major in college. Research results were included in two classes offered to graduate students and senior undergraduate students.