Wear Debris Monitoring Of Hybrid And Full Metal Ball Bear

Abstract

Hybrid bearings combine traditional bearing steel raceways with ceramic rolling elements and can offer improved performance against their full-metal bearing counterparts, particularly within aerospace applications. Rolling element bearings are critical components that benefit from condition monitoring to prevent in-flight failures and enact proactive maintenance procedures. Wear debris monitoring is commonly used for these applications, to identify and diagnose the bearing fault modes. Bearing life tests were conducted to compare the degradation and monitoring differences between hybrid and full-metal bearings with debris monitoring. It was found that under identical Hertzian stress loads, the differences in the degradation curves between full-metal and hybrid bearings were negligible in comparison to overall bearing degradation variance. Furthermore, it was found that hybrid bearings experiencing rolling element pitting will generally lead to raceway spall.