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In our project, a novel gear health monitoring system called a “smart gear sensor system” has been being developed. This system has a smart gear sensor and a monitoring antenna. The smart gear sensor has been created by using a laser sintering technique that allows a conductive ink to be sintered directly on the gear surface to form a sensor chain. This technique is also used to form an antenna pattern of the monitoring antenna. Experimentally, when the smart gear with the integrated sensor chain is brought parallelly close to the monitoring antenna while this antenna is connected to a network analyzer, a magnetic coupling happens. This wireless magnetic coupling is presented via the return loss signal gained by the network analyzer. Moreover, the conductivity of the sensor chain on the smart gear has been proven to affect the magnetically coupled return loss signal. Specifically, the shape of the return loss signal will be changed correspondingly. Since the sensor chain is sintered directly on the surface of the gear, the physical characteristics of the gear such as healthy or cracked will result in the quality of the sensor conductivity. Therefore, the smart gear's healthy or cracked characteristics can be observed via the return loss signal chart obtained by the network analyzer. In other words, the return loss signal can be considered essential data for the gear health monitoring process. Nevertheless, because the temperature will have a certain influence on the physical state of not only the gear but also the sintered sensor, the evaluation of the temperature to the magnetic coupling and its return loss signal becomes unavoidable. As a result, this study focuses majorly on the consideration of the influence of the temperature so that the accuracy of the proposed gear health monitoring method can be improved. The final experimental result and analysis demonstrate that the temperature also significantly impacts the return loss of the smart gear system.
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