Renewable bio-based composite gears

Financiers

The goal of the proposed project is to develop an array of fully biologically sourced composites with suitable engineering characteristics to be employed in gearing applications as an alternative to typically used petroleum-based polymers and composites. A crucial problem in obtaining high-performance polymer biocomposites is achieving proper interfacial interactions between the core matrix and the filler agents. Several chemical and physical methods will be considered to tackle this issue and the most suitable one will be implemented to achieve as durable and yet sustainable composites as possible.

As part of the project, an enhanced measurement method will be developed, based on optical measurements, using a high-speed camera, and vibration measurements that, combined with a tailored machine learning data analysis algorithm, will enable to correlate patterns in measured vibration signals with optical measurements of gear wear and fatigue crack progression. Based on a suitably trained algorithm it would presumably be possible to perform quick in-situ diagnostics of the gear’s occurring damage processes, based solely on vibration measurements. Furthermore, a sufficiently large data array obtained from this type of enhanced lifetime gear tests could serve to train the algorithm to correlate the measured damage progression with the gear’s measured service life. This would enable the development of a tool for fast prediction of new gear material’s expected service life, based on a smaller set of tests with limited duration.

Project Partners

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering