Thickness Measurement of Self-Lubricating Fabric Liner of Inner Ring of Sliding Bearings Using Spectral-Domain Optical Coherence Tomography

Abstract

This study presents a novel and highly accurate method of measuring the geometric thickness of the self-lubricating fabric liner of bearings by combining the optical coherence tomography (OCT) technology and the Hanning-windowed energy centrobaric method (HnWECM). The geometric thickness of wear-resistant coating material is one of the important indicators for evaluating its wear, and the measurement of its geometric thickness is of great significance for preventing coating failure. To address the issue of significant measurement errors caused by using the refractive index of the sample instead of the group refractive index to calculate the material’s geometrical thickness in previous OCT research and applications, our proposed method can accurately measure the geometrical thickness of materials without the influence of the refractive index of the material. Moreover, this method exhibits the advantages of non-contact and high precision, since it utilizes an SD-OCT system, making it a novel method for extracting the physical parameters of composite materials. The geometric thickness of the peeled-off liner obtained from our method is compared with the thickness measured by the spiral micrometer to evaluate its accuracy. The experimental results indicate that the thickness measured by the spiral micrometer was 172 μm, while the maximum difference in the data obtained by our method was 171.261 μm. This suggests that the difference between the two methods is less than 0.430%, which verifies the accuracy and validity of our method. Additionally, the obtained geometric thickness and the optical thickness of the peeled-off liner are used to evaluate the group refractive index of this material. The inside geometrical structure of the self-lubricating fabric liner on the end face and inner ring of the sliding bearing is imaged with this group refractive index. The measurement of the inner ring liner of the sliding bearing proves the flexibility of the fiber-optic OCT and provides a non-contact, nondestructive testing method for measuring the geometric thickness and internal geometric structure of composite materials.