ENDURE – Development of an adaptive control for oil-lubricated systems on the model level

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Sandro Wartzack
• Subject Area: Engineering Design, Machine Elements, Product Development
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539594388

Friction and wear occur in a wide range of technical systems, e.g. in the contact surfaces of machine elements such as rolling and plain bearings and gears. Reducing friction losses and preventing wear in oil-lubricated contacts of machine elements are therefore an important strategy for developing energy-efficient and durable technical products. To minimize friction and wear, oil is often used as a lubricant in tribological systems to separate the contact surfaces of the sliding and rolling contacts. The lubricant film height is of particular importance here. It describes the thickness of the lubricant layer separating the contact partners. On the one hand, a critical lubricant film thickness must always be exceeded to prevent wear, but on the other hand it must not become too great, since too much lubricant increases friction due to fluid friction. It is therefore desirable to regulate the lubricant film height as precisely as possible in order to achieve a compromise between low friction and low wear. The aim of the present project is therefore to develop an adaptive control of oil-lubricated systems, with which the optimum lubricant film height can be automatically set and maintained under changing operating conditions. By avoiding wear and increasing resource efficiency by minimizing friction, the operating lifetime of lubricated machine elements can be increased. The aim of this adaptive control is to enable a technical system to use measured operating parameters to provide an optimum quantity of lubricant to the tribological contact in every operating condition. The state of research on adaptive lubrication in tribological systems shows that only inadequate approaches are available to date. In the present project, the aim of developing an adaptive control system is to be achieved by coupling a real-time capable calculation model for lubricant film height and friction calculation (in operation) and an AI model trained with test rig and experimental data. By combining the two models, a so called greyboy model is to be developed, which will serve as the core of the adaptive lubrication to be developed in this application. The development and validation will be carried out, among other things, at the model level on a two-disk tribometer. At the end of the planned research project, the results obtained will be processed for knowledge transfer to enable them to be applied to other technical applications.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants