Fatigue Damage Mechanism of Oil Film Bearing Sleeve

With the rapid development of the steel industry, to keep pace with the current trend of high speed, continuous, and large-scale production that focuses on automation and high levels of efficiency, many state-owned steel companies are being equipped with oil film bearings. Through long-term on-spot inspection and research on the fatigue failure of oil film bearing, three segments of annulated fatigue breakage were found axially along the inner surface of the bearing sleeve. In order to elucidate the reason for the three-segment annulated damage under rolling load, numerical boundary element method was adopted to analyze the contact behaviors between the sleeve and rollneck. Failure mechanism was discussed in detail, the distributions of contact stress were analyzed, and the service lives of the sleeve for different positions on the inner surface were quantitatively described, which provided an effective means to decrease wear and adhesive damage of the sleeve and to increase the load capacity of oil film bearing and its service life as well.