Online measurement of wear depth based on displacement signal of vertical tester

This paper proposes an accurate and applicable online measurement method of wear depth using displacement signal for vertical testers under mixed lubrication. Firstly, displacement signal is revealed to be composed of temperature drift and Brownian motion. Secondly, the first order Taylor expansion of the Brownian motion is revealed to be the unified form of wear models. Further, the online measurement method is established by introducing non-integer order and amplitude coefficient to eliminate systematic randomness. Finally, the method is verified by graphite-metal tribo-pairs on a standard tester and a high speed friction and wear testing bench, relative errors between online and offline measurement results are less than 10 %, extension errors by non- integer order within its application range are less than 2 %.