Remaining useful life assessment and its application in the decision for remanufacturing

Remaining useful life (RUL) of a mechanical device or equipment is the lifetime from current time to the time that the device fails. Remaining useful life modelling and online assessment provide the timely message for system decision making in production management and conditionbased maintenance. RUL of a device is also essential in remanufacturing engineering in the decision for parts to be taken out service for remanufacturing. To take full advantage of the life of a device before remanufacturing, the RUL modelling of the device through online performance monitoring is critical to the remanufacturing plan. The inclusion of online performance monitoring will answer the basic questions about the timing of the remanufacturing processes that will lead to the renewal of parts. This paper proposes an analytical decision method for a remanufacturing program that is based on the remaining useful life online assessment. Support vector machine (SVM) model is used to estimate the remaining useful life and the performance reliability based on the predefined threshold for failure, and the remanufacturing characteristics. Furthermore, a corresponding remanufacturing strategy can be developed for the plan. This paper also illustrates an example of on-line data monitoring for a double row cylindrical roller bearing, which showed the validity of the aforementioned method.