Ring Crack Initiation Load of Silicon Nitride Bearing Balls

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In relation to the static load rating of silicon nitride bearing balls, the ring crack initiation load PR of hot isostatically pressed Si3N4 balls was investigated experimentally with emphasis on its statistical property. Initiation of a ring crack was detected using acoustic emission (AE) . PR approximately followed a 2-parameter Weibull distribution with a shape parameter of about 9. An attempt was made to predict the mean and scatter of PR using bending test data based on the concept of effective area. The predicted values were compared with the experimental results.