Fatigue Failure Analysis of Hollow Cylindrical Roller Bearing

Cylindrical roller bearings with hollow rollers are advantageous in applications where weight, lubrication and speed are major considerations in the operations of the bearings. An improvement in load distribution and thus load capacity may be realized, as well as contact stress is also reduced considerably by using a bearing with hollow rollers. Since from the implementation, for hollow roller bearing no method is available for the calculation of hollowness and contact stresses and ultimately premature failure will occur without performing its optimum life. In the present work failure analysis of Hollow Cylindrical Roller Bearing (HCRB) made from AISI 52100 is carried out to understand the type and mode of failure. This bearing is basically used in earthmoving equipments where heavy load is applied on bearing. The objective of the work is to identify the type of failure by using material oriented investigations. It was found that flexural fatigue is the mode of failure occurs in this bearing the reason for which is wrong selection of hollowness.