Additive manufacturing of a passive, sensor-monitored 16MnCr5 steel gear incorporating a wireless signal transmission system

A Review on Sensor‐Integrating Machine Elements

“…The authors have identified the following examples that can be categorized as sensor-integrating gears: i) Additively manufactured metal spur gear wheel with an integrated accelerometer; [115] ii) case-hardened metal helical gear wheel with hall sensor, accelerometer, temperature sensor, and microphone inside; [116] iii) plastic spur gear wheel with an eddy-current sensor in the teeth; [117] iv) metal spur gear wheel with resistance sensors on the side; [118] v) sensor-integrating metal spur gear with accelerometer on the side. [119,120]…”

“…Binder et al, [115] Sridhar & Chana, [117] Peters et al [119,120] use a feather key to fix the gears on the shaft. The feather key concentrates the stress of the interaction between the shaft and the wheel at a certain orbital position.…”

“…Binder et al, [115] Peters et al [119,120] selected acceleration sensors to measure the condition. Vibration-based monitoring is widespread in the condition monitoring of gears for example, in Tiboni et al, [121] Feng et al, [122] Sendlbeck et al, [105] Fromberger et al [114] The main sources of gear vibration under operation are mounting, manufacturing deviations, and the time-varying stiffness according to Fromberger et al, [114] Götz et al [123] When a fault occurs, additional vibrations caused by the fault can be measured.…”

“…MEMS sensors are widespread because of their comparable low costs and application in many modern consumer goods such as smartphones, wearables, and cars. Bogue, [125] Binder et al, [115] Peters et al [119,120] use both MEMS acceleration sensors. Peters et al [120] compared the sensor (STMicroelectronics IIS3DWB) with a piezoelectric sensor (PCB-356-06A2).…”

“…To maintain the properties of the gear the distribution of the electric components is also of interest for gear purposes. The gear wheel is typically under load and not purpose-designed for sensor integration as in Binder et al [115] Here, good integration even for existing gear geometry is possible due to the freedom of shaping enabled by additive manufacturing. Figure 16 shows the integration of the electric components by Binder et al [115] without the need for additional space.…”