Abstract:To investigate the cage stability of high-speed oil-lubricated angular contact ball bearings, a dynamic model of cages is developed on the basis of Gupta's and Meeks' work. The model can simulate the cage motion under oil lubrication with all six degrees of freedom. Particularly, the model introduces oil-film damping and hysteresis damping, and deals with the collision contact as imperfect elastic contact. In addition, the effects of inner ring rotational speed, the ratio of pocket clearance to guiding clearance and applied load on the cage stability are investigated by simulating the cage motion with the model. The results can provide a theoretical basis for the design of ball bearing parameters.In high-speed applications such as jet-engines and gyros, the instability of rolling bearing elements might lead to the sudden and catastrophic failure long before the anticipated fatigue life. This leads to the computational modeling and simulation of bearing dynamics to predict the conditions under which such instable motion might occur. Cage stability is one of the most important factors affecting the performance and life of rolling bearings. Thus the investigation of cage instability has received broad attention.Ball rolling bearings are the primary choice of high speed. Many researchers have developed some dynamic models, and investigated the influencing factors on cage stability. Walter [1] initially developed an analytical model for ball bearing. Gupta [2,3] developed a bearing simulation model ADORE, which is capable of simulating the motion of each bearing element in all six degrees of freedom. By simulating, Gupta investigated the correlation between cage instability and frictional characteristics of lubricant besides the effects of cage clearance, dynamic load and cage unbalance on the cage instability of a solidlubricated ball bearing. Meeks et al [4,5] proposed a dynamic model for the ball bearing in which there are six degrees of freedom for a cage. Kannel, Boesiger, Kingsbury Tateishi and other researchers made a great deal of studies on the dynamics of the cage of ball bearings. In additional, several researchers studied the dynamic characteristics of the cage of cylindrical or tapered roller rolling bearings [6,7] .The cage and balls with six degrees of freedom are considered in Gupta's dynamic model, but oil-film damping and hysteresis damping are not considered, and the contact is assumed as the perfect elastic contact. Although the contact is considered as the non-perfect contact in Meeks' model, but the motion of ball is constrained. Moreover, Meeks' model applies to the solidlubricated ball bearing.In China, the studies of the simulation of rolling bearings are mostly focused on cylindrical roller rolling bearings [8][9][10][11][12] , and some marked achievements have been made. By contrast, the studies of angular contact ball bearings are fewer, and the quasi-dynamic model rather than three-dimensional dynamic model is used to analyze the angular contact ball bearings [13,14] . The plane ...