Mechanical Equipment Reliability: Diagnosis, Prognostic and Maintenance

Dear Colleagues,

Mechanical equipment is a vast term that encompasses different areas, such as manufacturing, measurement, and logistics, and it is an essential asset for industry. However, issues around improving accuracy and efficiency, as well as reliability, must be solved to improve mechanical equipment performance. Operational safety, maintenance cost effectiveness, and availability have a direct impact on the competitiveness of machinery, and there is therefore a pressing need to continuously develop and improve reliability technologies for mechanical equipment, which is important for both equipment manufacturers and users.

Mechanical equipment performance deteriorates with use and age; thus, knowing when, where, and how equipment will deteriorate to the point of failure and how to properly but cheaply maintain it to ensure it stays in a good condition are significant problems. Moreover, mechanical equipment generally involves a complex system with interlinked mechanic, electronic, and hydraulic, traditional reliability technologies, and thus, the rapid development growth of mechanical equipment may not be possible due to multiple degradation types, complex failure mechanisms, and long-life properties. With the utilization of increased automation and sensor techniques, industries are attempting to monitor, analyze, and predict system degradation to optimize system maintenance policy, and to further control degradation tendencies, identify and predict failures, mitigate risks, and minimize costs. This is critical for the industry to solve the life-cycle health management issue of mechanical equipment, which is also a challenge in the field of reliability engineering. Therefore, more efficient and effective theoretical and experimental methodologies for mechanical equipment are expected to be developed to provide early detection and isolation of the precursor and/or incipient failure of components or subsystems, to have the means to monitor and predict the progression of failure, and to aid in creating or autonomously triggering a maintenance schedule and health management decisions or actions.

This Special Issue will be devoted to state-of-the-art research on reliability technologies and applications for mechanical equipment and their subsystems and components, such as machine tools, measuring instrument, industrial robots, articulated arms, motorized spindles, turrets, automatic tool changers (ATCs), etc. We seek submissions with an original perspective and advanced thinking on the theme addressed. Research on theories, simulations, experiments, and engineering applications is welcome.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Reliability design
• Reliability testing
• Reliability modeling
• Health management
• Failure diagnosis
• Failure analysis
• Service performance of material
• Micromechanics of materials
• Preventive maintenance
• Surface modification
• Lightweight design
• Security design
• Human reliability
• Dynamical stability

Dr. Lei Hou
Dr. Chuanhai Chen
Guest Editors

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