Modeling and Simulation of Cage Wear in Solid-Lubricated Rolling Bearings

Abstract

Cage not only separates the rolling elements but play an essential role of lubricant supplier in solid lubricated rolling bearings, thereby lubricating the rolling contacts. In such bearings, whose service life can be significantly extended by targeted cage wear, a better understanding and a reliable prediction of the wear is necessary in order to achieve a further increase in the service life. In order to predict wear and eventually their life-time is a complex phenomenon as it involves several transfer processes taking place in the rolling and sliding contacts. The lifespan of such bearings can be determined by performing numerous lifetime experiments. Global lifetime model for solid-lubricated rolling bearings does not exist so far like a conventional bearing life model. Therefore, a dynamic simulation strategy based on Adams multibody simulation environment to predict and model wear at cage pocket interface have been proposed. An incremental wear simulation approach based on Fleischer wear law is introduced. Uniform global wear of the cage pocket depending on the recalculation of cage geometry and converted frictional energy for each wear increment is calculated. Simulation results show good accordance with the experimental results. The importance and suitability of such a wear simulation approach will be enunciated in this paper.

Keywords

• rolling bearings
• solid lubrication
• cage pocket wear
• uneven cage pockets
• service life