Contact Stress Distribution of Large Diameter Ball Bearing Using Hertzian Elliptical Contact Theory

The large diameter bearings (diameter >400 mm) are of great importance in complex engineering mechanisms such as Aircraft gas turbines, Rolling Mills and Nuclear Reactor etc, in which varying load and critical environmental conditions leads to the failure of such bearings. Majorly spalling failure occurs due to contact mechanism. The contact mechanism of ball and raceway of bearing behaves highly non-linear and it reduces the service life of component considerably. This paper presents to determine the contact stress of large diameter ball bearings using analytical and numerical methods. In analytical method the contact stress is found out using the Hertzian Elliptical Contact Theory. The calculation procedure consists of calculation of the maximum contact pressure on the rolling element, which is done by the in-house developed program, and detailed finite element analysis of the contact between the ball and the raceway. The finite element analysis also performed to predict contact pressure in ball and raceway. Comparison of the results is made at the end.