Four-Point Contact Ball Bearing Model With Deformable Rings

In many applications, such as four-point contact slewing bearings or main shaft angular contact ball bearings, the rings and housings are so thin that the assumption of rigid rings does not hold anymore. In this paper, several methods are proposed to account for the flexibility of rings in a quasi-static ball bearing numerical model. The modeling approach consists of coupling a semianalytical approach and a finite element (FE) model to describe the deformation of the rings and housings. The manner in which this weak coupling is made differs depending on how the structural deformation of the ring and housing assemblies is injected into the set of nonlinear geometrical and equilibrium equations in order to solve them. These methods enable us to account for ring ovalization, ring twist, and raceway opening (including change of conformity) since a tulip deformation mode of the ring groove is observed for high contact angles. Either the torus fitting technique or mean displacement computation are used to determine these geometrical parameters. A comparison between the different approaches allows us to study, in particular, the impact of raceway conformity change. The loads used in this investigation are chosen in order that the maximum contact pressure (the Hertz pressure) at the ball-raceway interface remains below 2000 MPa, without any contact ellipse truncation. For the ball bearing example considered here, relative differences of up to 30% on the axial displacement, 10% on the maximum contact pressure, and 10% on the contact angle are observed by comparing rigid and deformable rings for a typical loading representative of the one encountered in operation. Despite the local change of conformity, which becomes significant at high contact angles and for thin ball bearing flanges, it is shown that this hardly affects the internal load distribution. The paper ends with a discussion on how the ring and housing flexibility may affect the loading envelope when the truncation of the contact ellipse is an issue.