Book Description

The use of bearings can be found in virtually all aspects of mechanical systems today. Reliability of these critical components is an important issue. Fatigue performance of bearings is a function of many factors, including service conditions, loading, material properties, environmental factors, and manufacturing processes. Crack nucleation, first spall generation and spall growth in rolling contact fatigue are known to be highly sensitive to the heterogeneity of the microstructure. Yet the current state-of-the-art in the design of high performance bearing materials and microstructures is highly empirical requiring substantial lengthy experimental testing to validate the reliability and performance of these new materials and processes. The approach presented here is designed to determine relative rolling contact fatigue performance as a function of microstructural attributes. A fully three-dimensional finite element modeling allows for end effects to be captured that were not previously possible with two-dimensional plane-strain models, providing for a more realistic assessment of inclusion morphology and arbitrary orientations. The scaling of the finite element models has been optimized to capture the cyclic microplasticity around a modeled inclusion accurately and efficiently. To achieve this, two scales of geometric models were developed to incorporate different sized microstructural phenomena, with both models using traction boundary conditions derived from Hertzian contact stresses.