Prediction and Validation of Impact Noise Radiation from Ball Bearings under Elastic Contact

This paper investigates the vibro-acoustic coupling behavior of high-speed ball bearings and the mechanisms driving vibration and radiated noise. Ball bearings consist of an inner ring, outer ring, cage, and rolling elements, whose complex interactions—impact, friction, and geometric non-uniformities—are difficult to capture experimentally. To address this challenge, a coupled numerical approach is developed by integrating the explicit nonlinear solver LS-DYNA with the acoustic module in LMS Virtual.Lab. Simultaneously, fixed boundary constraints and no-slip contact conditions are applied in the modal analysis to identify excitation sources of structural vibrations. First, a three-sphere collision simulation is employed for validation, and the calculated sound pressure agrees well with experimental results reported in the literature, with a maximum error of 0.019 Pa. Additional simulations of ball bearings at rotational speeds ranging from 10,000 to 20,000 rpm demonstrate good agreement with literature-reported measurements of maximum sound pressure levels, with errors within 1.08 dB(A). These results demonstrate that the proposed framework can reliably reproduce vibro-acoustic responses across a wide speed range. The developed numerical procedure therefore offers an efficient and accurate platform for analyzing the dynamic and acoustic characteristics of ball bearings.