Maintenance policy for oil-lubricated systems with oil analysis data

Abstract

Maintenance of oil-lubricated systems plays a significant role in reducing unexpected system failures and improving machine availability. This paper deals with the oil-lubricated systems subject to gradual degradation that revealed by metal wear debris monitored using oil analysis. Oil-lubricated systems usually undertake several preventive maintenances during operation, after each maintenance, the system typical restores to an intermediate state between good-as-new state and bad-as-old state due to system aging such as cumulative wear. Furthermore, oil-lubricated systems often operate continuously in mission execution with availability constraints. However, existing literature still lacks a method to integrate the availability constraints with the system aging into the cause of optimizing the maintenance policy. To fill this gap, this paper develops a maintenance policy optimization method to determine the optimal maintenance threshold joint considering the availability constraints and the system aging. A case study of the power-shift steering transmission systems modelled by a wiener process is presented to illustrate the proposed method in practical application.