PhD in Failure Models for Transmission Gears Health Monitoring in Cranfield United Kingdom | Cranfield University

This doctoral research will create a failure model to analyze how surface and bending failures interact in gears, enabling more accurate health predictions. Current gear failure models struggle with lifetime estimation because they treat surface damage (like scuffing and pitting) and bending fatigue as separate phenomena. However, real-world gear operation involves complex interactions between load, speed, and lubrication that existing models oversimplify through assumptions. While academic research has produced various approximation-based models, these remain limited to specific failure types. In practice, gears often experience combined failure modes, causing premature breakdowns that single-mode models cannot predict. This project will establish a unified theory incorporating both failure types, grounded in fundamental gear mathematics and initially validated against existing theories. The mathematical framework will then power a gear testing simulation, evaluating the model across various operational conditions. Physical gear experiments will provide final validation of this comprehensive approach.