Aviation Spline Wear Test Bench and Fretting Wear Measurement

Splines are widely used in aircraft power plants for their high load carrying capacity. Fretting wear and fatigue occur sometimes and have been a prominent problem for aviation splines. Currently, the wear mechanism of aviation splines is still not clear, which endangers and shortens their service life seriously. This paper establishes an aviation spline wear test bench, which is mainly composed of spline rotor system, lubrication system, control and test systems. The test bench can rotate continuously for several hours without any interruption and can realize accurate angular misalignment through adjusting the horizontal position of support bearings. Based on the proposed test bench, some fretting wear experiments are conducted using involute aviation splines under both aligned and misaligned conditions. Spline weight loss, wear debris weight and tooth wear depth are selected to quantify fretting wear behavior. Experimental results show that angular misaligned splines have obvious fretting wear, whereas the aligned ones almost have no wear.