DYNAMIC ANALYSIS OF ROLLER BEARING USING FINITE ELEMENT METHOD (FEM)

Abstract

Rolling element bearing being one of the key components in rotating machinery, so their good condition is vital for the machine performance. Any bearing in operation will invariably fail at some point, with may cause the machine breakdown. Allowing a machine to breakdown before repairing is expensive as production time is lost and the bearing defect may propagate to other machine components leading to their failure and subsequent replacement. The stiffness, rotational accuracy and vibration characteristics of a high-speed shaft are partially controlled by roller bearings that support it. In the rotor bearing assembly supported by perfect ball bearings, the vibration spectrum is dominated by the vibrations at the natural frequency. Modal analysis is performed on a system to determine its natural frequencies. With common software packages, the eigenmodes of the examined system can be graphically animated. Operationally critical or acoustically unfavorable natural vibration modes of the structure can thereby be detected. Through targeted changes in system properties, such as material damping or additional reinforcement measures, they can be modified to avoid critical frequency ranges or to travel through them with reduced amplitudes. In this work a 3D model of a healthy bearing and bearing with defects on inner and outer races is developed using Solidworks. The model is then imported to ANSYS for Static and Modal Analysis