Assessment of Wear Form Weights in the Fretting Wear of Spline Couplings with BP Neural Network

Abstract

This paper investigates the fretting wear behavior of spline couplings under grease and oil lubrication conditions, which includes coupling eccentricity measurement and wear intensity measurement at a tensile test rig. Mechanism analysis of worn splines was also studied to understand the wear forms of the tested splines. Firstly, the wear intensities of spline couplings DIN 5480 45×2×21 8f/9Hlubricated with grease Gleitmo 805 and ISO VG 320 gearbox oil Mobilgear XMP 320 were measured. Test results showed that the wear intensity reduced rapidly in the running-in phase till 3-5×106 load cycles (rotations), depending on the lubrication conditions. After that the spline couplings had a stable wear behavior till 10×106. Secondly the influences of lubrications on splines wear intensities and wear mechanism were studied. It indicated that the spline with grease lubrication had best wear behavior in comparison with oil and not lubricated ones. Finally, a fretting wear intensity calculation method which integrated the weights of adhesive wear, abrasive wear and oxidation wear was developed to calculate the wear intensity of splines.1 BP neural network model was employed for assessment of the weights of each wear form. The BP results showed that mixed adhesive, abrasive and oxidation wear happened in the tested spline couplings, which was verified through chemical composition analysis of the spline teeth faces after different load cycles. The calculated fretting wear agreed well with the tested value, indicating that the developed fretting wear intensity calculation model including wear form weights evaluated via BP neural network simulation had high accuracy on predicting the fretting wear of involuted splines.