Study of ball bearing fatigue damage using vibration analysis: application to thrust ball bearings

This paper presents a study based on the damage due to the fatigue life of thrust ball bearings using vibratory analysis. The main contribution of this work lies in establishing a relation between modal damping and the rolling contact fatigue damage of the thrust ball bearing. Time domain signals and frequency spectra are extracted from both static and dynamic experiments. The first part of this research consists in measuring the damping of damaged thrust ball bearings using impact hammer characterization tests. In a second part, indented components representing spalled bearings are studied to determine the evolution of damping values in real-time vibration spectra using the random decrement method. Dynamic results, in good agreement with static tests, show that damping varies depending on the component's damage state. Therefore, the method detailed in this work will offer a possible technique to estimate the thrust ball bearing fatigue damage variation in presence of spalling