Experimental and Computational Evaluation of Rolling Bearing Steel Durability

Abstract

Rolling element bearings are widely-used machine components and their failure can result in damage to the whole machine. A bearing failure can be caused by many factors. In most cases it is damage on the raceway surface as a result of rolling contact fatigue (RCF). This article describes the fatigue analysis consists of determining service-life of a roller bearing using a stress-strain analysis with finite element method and subsequent numeric calculation using software fe-safe with application of multiaxial fatigue criterion. These theoretical results are compared to the experiments carried out on AXMAT test-rig with more accurate defect detection using acoustic emission method. Numerical service-life calculation can be applied as tool for fatigue life prediction of full scale bearing with sufficient correlation with experimental results.

Rolling element bearings are widely-used machine components and their failure can result in damage to the whole machine. A bearing failure can be caused by many factors. In most cases it is damage on the raceway surface as a result of rolling contact fatigue (RCF). This article describes the fatigue analysis consists of determining service-life of a roller bearing using a stress-strain analysis with finite element method and subsequent numeric calculation using software fe-safe with application of multiaxial fatigue criterion. These theoretical results are compared to the experiments carried out on AXMAT test-rig with more accurate defect detection using acoustic emission method. Numerical service-life calculation can be applied as tool for fatigue life prediction of full scale bearing with sufficient correlation with experimental results.