THERMAL STRESS ANALYSIS OF A BALL BEARING BY FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

High cutting speeds and feeds are essential requirements of a machine tool structure to accomplish its basic function which is to produce a work piece of the required geometric form with an acceptable surface finish at as high a rate of production as is economically possible. Since bearings in high speed spindle units are the main source of heat generation. Friction in bearings causes an increase of the temperature inside the bearing. If the heat produced cannot be adequately removed from the bearing, the temperature might exceed a certain limit, and as a result the bearing would fail. To analyse the heat flow in a bearing system, a typical ball bearing and its environment has been modelled and analysed using the finite element method. The maximum temperature in the bearing has been calculated as a function of heat generation with the rotational speed as a parameter.