Reliability Estimation of the Solid Lubricated Bearing Based on a General Wiener Process and Its Experimental Validation

Abstract

AbstractConducting accurate reliability estimation plays an important role for solid lubricated bearings, because they are widely used in highly reliable space applications. This paper proposes a general Wiener process to describe the degradation process for solid lubricated bearings. The performance indicator for solid lubricated bearings is a fusion indicator from several time domain statistics of vibration signal during operation. Mahalanobis Distance (MD) is utilized to fuse these time-domain statistics indicators into one indicator representing the degradation process. Two different time scale functions in drift term and fluctuation term of Wiener process are used to capture the nonlinearity characteristics of degradation process. Bayesian MCMC method is used to estimate all the unknown parameters in the proposed degradation model. Degradation data from experiment is used to validate the model. Results show that general Wiener process degradation model is fit well for the degradation data.KeywordsSolid lubricated bearingsMahalanobis DistanceWiener processReliability estimation