Determining the Optimal Interval for the Technical Diagnostics of Bearings

Bearings are important part of many machines and technical systems. Thus, their preventive maintenance has to be carefully planned. It is important to predict accurate period in which a bearing will work in its nominal performance. Therefore, inspection requirements and intervals have to be determined for appropriate bearing maintenance. Diagnostics’ schedule has to take into account an importance of the specific system or machine. There are various methods for that. Even with their application, every now and then, the improper selection, unexpected variations in machine performance, bearing handling, used materials, and various working conditions can cause the bearing to wear off faster or last longer than predicted. Hence, it is desirable to focus on systematic optimization of bearing testing schedule. In addition, one of the main reasons for this is because diagnostics procedures themselves are costly and lengthy. The intention of study presented in this paper is to make a model that will be complex in the sense of relating maintenance expenses, condition parameters, and reliability elements of the system, but simple enough for use in more general applications. Developed model should take into account several factors, so that it can be usable in practice. This mathematical model could be used in technical systems for bearings inspection. The model has been developed based on normal distribution regime until its failure. The normal distribution was used because of its simplicity during initial phase of this study. The Weibull distribution could be used to address other problems that are out of scope of normal distribution. The exact results have been obtained in the implementation of the diagnostics technique according to this sort of distribution regime. In this paper, an example of its implementation on one specific problem will be shown.