Fatigue Life Assessment of Rolling Bearings Made from AISI 52100 Bearing Steel

The rolling bearings used in various industrial applications are exposed to fatigue failure during their operation. Generally, in a practical application, the ISO 281:2007 standard is used for fatigue life assessments of rolling bearings. The application of the formula given in this standard requires knowledge concerning the basic dynamic load rating C. The natural question is raised of whether it is possible to omit the time-consuming experimental tests while still effectively calculating the fatigue load or the load capacity of the bearings. In the paper, the authors propose the application of analytical formulas for stresses in the contact area and its vicinity, and the usage of the multiaxial high-cycle fatigue hypothesis to estimate the maximal fatigue load for the rolling bearings. In the proposed methodology, only the knowledge concerning the fatigue properties of the material and geometry characteristics of the analyzed bearings are demanded. The effectiveness of the authors’ proposal is verified for arbitrarily chosen bearings. The observed discrepancy between the catalogue fatigue load (SKF catalogue) and numerically calculated fatigue load usually does not exceed 10%, which is fully acceptable from an engineering point of view and justifies the approach proposed in the paper. The proposed methodology can be used for the prediction of the fatigue life and optimization of the rolling bearings.