The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the cage-pocket wear on the dynamic behavior of the ball bearing.
Through analyzing the complicated relationship and interactions among the ball bearing elements, the dynamic modeling of the ball bearing was established considering the gravity, drag force from the oil, hydrodynamic effect on the cage and the dynamic simulations with different amounts of the cage-pocket wear loss of the ball bearing (BPWL) were obtained by solving the ball bearing dynamic equations using Runge–Kutta method.
The results show that the trajectory of the cage’s centroid presents two vibration modes with different amplitudes. In addition, those two different forms of trajectory of different amplitudes emerge alternatively with BPWL increase moreover the diameter of the trajectory decrease significantly with the BPWL increasing, which is consistent with the experimental result and last BPWL has lightly effect on the average skidding ratio of the cage, however, the BPWL would produce significant effects on the fluctuation of the skidding ratio, which can directly reflect the stability of motion to a certain extent.
Practice shows that the bearing failure resulting from the cage accounts for 25 per cent of the total failure of the rolling bearings. However, few discussions about how the wear of the cage-pocket would influence the dynamic characteristics of the cage. This study can provide important ideas for the design of bearing cage-pocket size and the fault identification of the ball bearing to decrease the failure rate caused by the cage.
The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-12-2019-0535/
