Probe Improvement of Inductive Sensor for Online Health Monitoring of Mechanical Transmission Systems

Metal debris in lubricating oil contains abundant information regarding the ageing and wear/damage of mechanical transmission systems. The health condition of the lubricated systems can be indicated by the concentration and size of the metal abrasive particles, which may provide very early warnings of faults/failures and benefit the condition-based maintenance. An improved inductive sensor that uses saddle-coil probe to generate a uniform magnetic field for performance improvement on the metal particle detection is proposed in this paper. The detailed geometry and the performance analysis are presented by using finite element analysis. The results demonstrate that the proposed saddle-coil inductive sensor possesses good identification ability of recognizing the ferromagnetic and nonferromagnetic oil debris particles whose diameters are as small as 100 μm.