Surface Topography and Fatigue Life of Rolling Contact Bearing

The contact stresses of bearings were analyzed by a micro-macrocontact model in which the macrocontact was elastic, and the microcontact was elastic-plastic. Subsurface stress maps were calculated for real contact surfaces, by including roughness, waviness, and profile. The predicted subsurface stress maps display the local stress levels for various elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) film thicknesses and show why enhanced-finish bearings have longer lives than the standard-finish bearings. It is believed that the present approach provides an alternative to the empirical methods that are used for predicting life under thin-film EHL conditions.