Impact Force between Rolling Ball and Surface Fault in Damaged Ball Bearings

A great deal of research work has been dedicated in the last few decades to the development of refined and effective procedures for rolling bearing monitoring and diagnostics through vibration analysis. The basic observation is that sudden impact and consequent casing vibration take place every time a rolling ball overpasses a surface defect. As far as the authors know, little work has been focused on characterizing the impact force itself, i. e. determining its actual pattern and value. In this paper, the problem of identifying impact force between rolling balls and races is tackled experimentally. The force is recovered by inverse filtering of the casing acceleration. Results indicate the potential effectiveness of the method.