Ultrasonic testing using shear polarised waves is widely applied in medical and engineering fields, commonly employed for hardness or stress measurement. The advantage of ultrasonic shear waves for wear measurement lies in their lower wave propagation speed and their sensitivity in measuring the wear scars formed through the shear motion. An in-situ wear measurement method of thin metallic coatings using ultrasonic shear waves is proposed in this study. A finite element analysis was used to investigate the interaction between an ultrasonic shear wave and various geometric wear scars. Compared with longitudinal waves, the result shows that 10 MHz shear waves and 22 MHz longitudinal waves have a similar performance in the measurement of undamaged metallic coatings. Whereas, for discontinuously distributed scars, the 10 MHz shear wave shows an amplitude decrease, where the energy has been reflected to both sides. Then, the in-situ tests were conducted, and the shear wave measurements of wear were compared with the microscope results. For 350 μm aluminium-alloy coated samples, the maximum deviation between shear wave results and microscope results was 5.13 μm, with a relative error of 1.5%. For 250 μm bronze–lead coatings, the maximum deviation was 5.54 μm, with a relative error of 2.51%. The practicality of using shear waves to determine continuous wear progression in bearings is briefly discussed, and their potential for monitoring the health of bearing coatings in service.

Aluminium and other soft metal coated plain bearings are common in high-speed rotating machines due to their light weight and high performance. This makes the monitoring of bearing surface condition an important requirement to ensure healthy machine operation. In this paper, an ultrasound-based technique is investigated to measure the wear condition of thin aluminium bearing coatings. High-frequency 22 MHz piezoelectric sensors were selected based on both numerical simulations and experiments. Tests were performed on four groups of samples with artificial damage and three groups of samples worn by dry running. The results have shown the deviation between ultrasound measurement and microscope measurement are within 5 μm for artificially damaged samples and within 15 μm for samples worn under dry running conditions.