From Cleanliness to Rolling Fatigue Life of Bearings — A New Approach

One of the main causes of in-service spalling of bearing steels is fatigue crack initiation from non-metallic inclusions. At the present time, while the relationship between endurance and cleanliness of bearing steels is obvious, no quantitative relationship between them has been established. The aim of this paper is to present a new quantitative method which predicts the rolling fatigue life distribution of bearings. This approach is based on a model of fatigue crack initiation in the vicinity of an inclusion in the steel matrix and on a simple fatigue crack propagation relationship. This basic model is used in a statistical approach to describe the scatter of fatigue lives using the distribution of inclusions in the Hertzian zone. The fairly good agreement with fatigue results shows that this approach constitutes a real future tool for predicting the influence of the main material parameters on the fatigue life distribution of bearings.