Evaluation of Strain and Temperature Measurements with Fiber Bragg Grating for Loss Verification and Heat Transfer of Ball Bearings

Sammanfattning: Volvo Cars is in a change of producing only electric and hybrid cars by 2025.Subcomponent testing is a crucial part to ensure the quality of the individual buildingblocks in an electric machine. Any way of making these tests more reliable and less timeconsuming is of great interest at Volvo. Force and temperature on bearings are especiallyhard to measure accurately, because of their placement and dynamic behavior. Accurateand reliable measurements is also a vital part in creating realistic Computer-AidedEngineering (CAE) models for simulation purposes. Simulations on bearings could lead tobetter bearing choices and accelerate the design process. This could increase bearing lifeand increase the Electrical Vehicle (EV) range due to minimized friction losses. FiberBragg Grating (FBG) sensors is a technology that has some key advantages overconventional sensors. They are immune to EMI, smaller in size, can have multiple sensorsin one fiber and can measure multiple physical quantities at the same time. Volvo Cars isinterested in investigating whether this sensor technology could be a candidate forreplacing some of the current measurement setup configurations.The project was divided into three parts, validating sensor equipment, find method forinstallation and measurement on a bearing and development of a CAE model for bearinglosses and heat transfer. To validate the sensor equipment a Measurement SystemAnalysis (MSA) was performed on two FBG fibers, one FBG isolated from strain fortemperature measurement and one FBG array with multiple sensing points. From theMSA it could be seen that the FBG temperature sensor had a total uncertainty of 3.4 °CThe FBG array had a strain uncertainty of 1.04 μ