Remaining useful life prediction of lubricating oil with dynamic principal component analysis and proportional hazards model

Lubricating oil contains a lot of tribological information of the machine and plays an important role in machine health. Oil degrades with serving time and causes severe wear afterwards, which is a complex dynamic process, and difficult to be accurately described by a single property. Therefore, the main purpose of deterioration prediction is to estimate the remaining useful life that the oil can still fulfill its functions by analyzing oil condition monitoring data. With a large amount of oil condition monitoring data collected, a vector autoregressive model is applied to the original oil data to describe the dynamic deterioration process. Then dynamic principal component analysis, an effective dimensionality reduction method, is employed to obtain the principal components capturing the most information of the oil data. The proportional hazards model is then built to calculate the failure risk of the lubricating oil based on the condition monitoring information, where its baseline function represents the aging process assuming to follow the Weibull distribution and its positive link function represents the influence of covariates (the principal components) on the failure risk. Finally, the remaining useful life prediction of lubricating oil can be obtained by explicit formulas of the characteristics such as the conditional reliability function and the mean residual life function. This work provides an approach to assess the health of lubricating oil, and a guidance for oil maintenance strategy.