Intelligent diagnosis of magnetorheological clutch using image processing techniques

The clutch is one of the important components of a vehicle system. Therefore, it is crucial to keep an eye on them and spot any faults while they are operating so that the operators can be informed and possible issues can be solved before they arise. In general, a fault in the clutch causes it to get eccentricity in the disc and the contact between housing and disc during its operation which impacts the non-linear dynamic behaviour of the clutch mechanism and hence it affects the performance of the same. For condition monitoring, infrared imaging is essential since the thermographic patterns change based on the defect or machine condition. In this study, novel attempts have been made to present an intelligent tribological diagnosis of magnetorheological clutch under conditions such as eccentricity of the disc due to misalignment and the contact between housing and disc with the help of an image obtained from the thermal camera. The study for intelligent tribological diagnosis has been done by image processing algorithms in the MATLAB environment. The image segmentation for diagnosis is done by the thresholding technique followed by the feature extraction technique by the Circular Hough transform algorithm. The results successfully determine whether the eccentricity and the contact between the housing and disc due to misalignment are present or not, with the help of circular features in red and blue colour.