Effect of Loading Position of Housing on Rolling Element Load Distribution of Rolling Bearings

Abstract

An external load applied to a rolling bearing is distributed among the rolling elements. The conventional calculation of load distribution among rolling elements already established assumes that the bearing races, shaft and housing are rigid except for elastic contact deformations at the individual contacts between rolling elements and raceways. In many applications, the bearing rings as well as the supporting structures can not be considered rigid, so that the actual load distribution is different from that predicted on the above assumption. A newly method of determining dynamic load distributions using an optical fiber strain sensor mounted on a roller of an actual cylindrical roller bearing has been already proposed in our previous work. The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of loading positions of a housing on the load distributions. The measurement results have shown different load distributions from those obtained from the conventional theory. This paper has proposed an expanded load distribution function giving such load distributions which can not be expressed by the conventional theory, and investigated the effect of the load distribution on bearing life. Furthermore, the relationship between the load distribution and the housing deformation has been investigated with the finite element method (FEM).