Dimensional Description of On-line Wear Debris Images for Wear Characterization

As one of the most wear monitoring indicator, dimensional feature of individual particles has been studied mostly focusing on off-line analytical ferrograph. Recent development in on-line wear monitoring with wear debris images shows that merely wear debris concentration has been extracted from on-line ferrograph images. It remains a bottleneck of obtaining the dimension of on-line particles due to the low resolution, high contamination and particle’s chain pattern of an on-line image sample. In this work, statistical dimension of wear debris in on-line ferrograph images is investigated. A two-step procedure is proposed as follows. First, an on-line ferrograph image is decomposed into four component images with different frequencies. By doing this, the size of each component image is reduced by one fourth, which will increase the efficiency of subsequent processing. The low-frequency image is used for extracting the area of wear debris, and the high-frequency image is adopted for extracting contour. Second, a statistical equivalent circle dimension is constructed by equaling the overall wear debris in the image into equivalent circles referring to the extracted total area and premeter of overall wear debris. The equivalent circle dimension, reflecting the statistical dimension of larger wear debris in an on-line image, is verified by manual measurement. Consequently, two preliminary applications are carried out in gasoline engine bench tests of durability and running-in. Evidently, the equivalent circle dimension, together with the previously developed concentration index, index of particle coverage area （IPCA）, show good performances in characterizing engine wear conditions. The proposed dimensional indicator provides a new statistical feature of on-line wear particles for on-line wear monitoring. The new dimensional feature conveys profound information about wear severity.

A Development of A Computer aided Ferrographic System

In this paper the authors suggest a computer aided system for processing data and images of ferrographic analysis by the authors. The system consists of seven modules and five databases. There is a typical wear particle library in the system. Its applications state that the analytical speed increases with this system and more information can be obtained by using this system.

Optimized Mask-RCNN model for particle chain segmentation based on improved online ferrograph sensor

Ferrograph-based wear debris analysis(WDA)provides significant information for wear fault analysis of mechanical equipment.After decades of offline application,this conventional technology is being driven by the online ferrograph sensor for real-time wear state monitoring.However,online ferrography has been greatly limited by the low imaging quality and segmentation accuracy of particle chains when analyzing degraded lubricant oils in practical applications.To address this issue,an integrated optimization method is developed that focuses on two aspects:the structural re-design of the online ferrograph sensor and the intelligent segmentation of particle chains.For enhancing the imaging quality of wear particles,the magnetic pole of the online ferrograph sensor is optimized to enable the imaging system directly observe wear particles without penetrating oils.Furthermore,a light source simulation model is established based on the light intensity distribution theory,and the LED installation parameters are determined for particle illumination uniformity in the online ferrograph sensor.On this basis,a Mask-RCNN-based segmentation model of particle chains is constructed by specifically establishing the region of interest(ROI)generation layer and the ROI align layer for the irregular particle morphology.With these measures,a new online ferrograph sensor is designed to enhance the image acquisition and information extraction of wear particles.For verification,the developed sensor is tested to collect particle images from different degraded oils,and the images are further handled with the Mask-RCNN-based model for particle feature extraction.Experimental results reveal that the optimized online ferrography can capture clear particle images even in highly-degraded lubricant oils,and the illumination uniformity reaches 90%in its imaging field.Most importantly,the statistical accuracy of wear particles has been improved from 67.2%to 94.1%.