Study on the influence of thermal characteristics of rolling bearings and spindle resulted in condition of improper assembly

Thermal analysis of spindle-bearing system with improper assembly is crucial but insufficient. Aimed at this, spindle system of ball bearings with tilting outer ring was proposed. Firstly, based on quasi-static analysis, the bearing friction heat was analyzed and calculated, and the effect of tilting bearing outer ring on bearing's contact angle, contact force and friction heat was investigated. Secondly, steady thermal simulation analysis on spindle in consideration of tilting outer ring was completed. Afterwards, for validation purpose, outer spacers with different non-parallelism were respectively assembled on the spindle to simulate bearing outer ring's different tilt statuses. The results indicated that, bigger tilt angle of bearing outer ring results in greater bearing's heat generation power and higher steady temperature of bearing outer ring. Simultaneously, in comparison with non-tilting outer ring, outer ring tilted to a certain extend will lead to greatly increase in friction heat of the certain rolling element. Experimental results verified the simulation analysis as that increasing non-parallelism of outer spacer leads to decreasing temperature difference between front and rear bearings. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.