Dynamic behaviour of rolling bearings: simulations and experiments

Rolling bearings have been very common machine elements for more than 100 years. During this time, vast experiences about their steady state behaviour, e.g. their load-carrying capacity has been accumulated. Fatigue life predictions have been refined to handle clean and contaminated bearings. The understanding of the dynamic behaviour of rolling bearings has not reached the same level of maturity. Still most phenomena that occur in rolling bearings, under both normal and unacceptable operation, are dynamic in nature. These dynamic phenomena have to be studied with dynamic tools. One such tool is the bearing simulation tool, called BEAST. BEAST is based on multi-body techniques, with special focus on contact problems. It allows for studies of the dynamic behaviour of all bearing components under general loading conditions, e.g. the forces on and motions of the cage, skew and tilt behaviours of rollers and skidding of balls. A description of the most important aspects of the BEAST model and some examples of comparisons with experiments, are given in this paper.