Condition monitoring of PTFE composite material bearing through the correlation between lubricant condition and wear simulation

At present, most of the researches on friction and wear of bearing are focused on rubber bearing and Babbitt bearing. Study on characteristics of bearing that is made of Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) composite material is less reported. This paper mainly carried out the calculation and experimental research on the rule of wearing between PTFE composited bearing and steel shaft. A correct model was built in Pro/E at first, and then it is imported to ANSYS Module. After dividing grid and setting proper boundary conditions to derive and analyze, the friction stress distribution diagram of the bearing was obtained. Then the wear volume of the bearing was calculated according to the stress distribution, and the simulation and calculation were repeated after modifying the bearing model to a worn one. The results demonstrate that the stress of the bearing under lower half of bearing shell is larger than that of the upper one, and the stress of each bearing at the side that is close to armature is larger than the one at the side that is far away from armature. At the same time, the atomic emission spectrometer (AES) was used to analyze the lubricating oil. In order to get the differences between used oil and new oil, the AES data are compared to the result of bearing wear simulation to verify the correctness of model and method. And the correlation between them are build up to predict the wearing of bearing by the online monitoring data of bearing lubricant oil.