Prognosability study of ball screw degradation using systematic methodology

As a critical mechanical component that converts rotary motion to linear motion with high precision, the ball screw has drawn a lot of attention in the field of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). However, prognosis of the ball screw degradation has not been fully discussed yet in the current literature. This paper first justifies the prognosability of a ball screw via experimental studies, then proposes a systematic methodology for ball screw prognosis to implement the fault diagnosis, early diagnosis, health assessment and remaining useful life (RUL) prediction. Meanwhile, sensor-less and sensor-rich strategies are investigated and benchmarked in the experimental studies. The results demonstrate that the ball screw degradation behavior is available for prognosis and the proposed methodology can effectively help users to implement PHM analysis. Besides, the benchmark studies between sensor-less and sensor-rich strategies also achieve several practical conclusions that are valuable for real-world applications.