Remaining useful life prediction for power-shift steering transmission based on fusion of multiple oil spectra

Remaining useful life prediction is a critical issue to fault diagnosis and health management of power-shift steering transmission. Power-shift steering transmission wear, which leads to the increase of wear particles and severe wear afterwards, is a slow degradation process, which can be monitored by oil spectral analysis, but the actual degree of the power-shift steering transmission degradation is often difficult to evaluate. The main purpose of this article is to provide a more accurate remaining useful life prediction methodology for power-shift steering transmission compared to relying solely on an individual spectral oil data. Our methodology includes multiple degradation data fusion, degradation index construction, degradation modelling and remaining useful life estimation procedures. First, the robust kernel principal component analysis is used to reduce the data dimension, and the state space model is utilized to construct the wear degradation index. Then, the Wiener process–based degradation model is established based on the constructed degradation index, and the explicit formulas for several important quantities for remaining useful life estimation such as the probability density function and cumulative distribution function are derived. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology. The results show that the proposed remaining useful life prediction methodology can objectively describe the power-shift steering transmission degradation law, and the predicted remaining useful life has been extended as 65 Mh (38.2%) compared with specified maintenance interval. This will reduce the maintenance times of power-shift steering transmission life cycle and finally save the maintenance costs.