Damage analysis in high loaded oscillating bearings

The rolling bearing size and weight optimization is becoming a crucial economic issue in several industrial applications (aeronautic, aerospace, robotic…). The challenge is to transmit more and more power through small bearing components, inducing high contact stresses that threat the bearing material integrity. On the other hand, some of these high loaded bearings have to operate with oscillating motion for which the low relative velocity between contacting pairs doesn’t allow for developing an oil EHD lubrication regime. Therefore the combination of high contact stresses and oscillating motion represents an extreme working condition where the bearings fail relatively early, undergoing specific failure modes not still discussed on the literature. On the current study, both experimental and numerical works are made to point out the damage scenario of a high loaded oscillating ball bearing. SEM analyses are also performed to investigate the contact surface topography evolution.