Remaining useful life prediction of ball screw based on integrating preload and precision

Abstract Ball screw remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is of great interest to industry and academia. However, the lack of a reliable prediction model limits accuracy. To address this, a hybrid method that combines physical-based and data-driven methods is proposed. A novel integrated index is developed to capture wear degradation by integrating the preload and precision parameters, and the optimum partitioning method is used for wear stage categorization. A physical-based method of a two-stage empirical model is constructed to characterize the randomness and nonlinearity of the degradation process. Model parameters are initialized and updated using particle filtering (PF) through a data-driven method for RUL prediction. To address discontinuous predictions in the empirical model, the random forest with PF (RF-PF) method is employed. The effectiveness of this approach is evaluated through experiments and comparisons with other methods.