Bearing stiffness, as one of the most important service characteristics for ball bearing, plays a crucial role in the bearing design and rotor dynamic analysis. To rapidly and accurately calculate the stiffness matrix of ball bearing under the arbitrary load conditions, a 5-DOF analytical model for bearing stiffness matrix analysis has been established by the ball–raceway contact analysis, implicit/explicit differential method, and matrix operations. The model has been validated comparing with the previous methods and experimental results. Based on this, the model has been used to investigate the influences of the load and operation conditions, the structural parameters variation on stiffness of ball bearing. The results show that property increasing axial preload can inhibit the attenuation of speed-varying stiffness, and the contact states between balls and raceways also have significant influence on the change in the stiffness of ball bearings. Besides, a larger curvature coefficient of inner raceway and a small curvature coefficient of outer raceway can effectively improve the stiffness of ball bearing at high speed. Therefore, the proposed method can be a useful tool in bearing optimize design and performance analysis of ball and rotor system under various load conditions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.