Characterization of fretting wear experiments on spline couplings by principal component analysis

Fretting wear is a quasi-static process in which repeated relative surface movement of components results in wear and fatigue. Fretting wear is quite significant in the case of spline couplings which are frequently used in the aircraft industry to transfer torque and power. Fretting wear depends on materials, pressure distribution, torque, rotational speeds, lubrication, surface finish, misalignment between spline shafts, etc. The presence of so many factors makes it difficult to conduct experiments for better models of fretting wear and it is the case whenever a mathematical model is sought from experimental data which is prone to noisy measurements, outliers and redundant variables. This work develops a principal component analysis based method, using a criterion which is insensitive to outliers, to realize a better design and interpret experiments on fretting wear. The proposed method can be extended to other cases too.