A Voronoi Finite Element Method Of Fatigue Life Analysis Of Rolling Bearings

Rolling bearings are one of the most important mechanical components and can be found in a wide range of applications.The life prediction of rolling bearings is of great significance.One of the main modes of failure of rolling bearings is rolling contact fatigue,and microlevel material failure has been recognized as one of the main modes of failure for rolling contact fatigue.Hence,it is very important to establish accurate microlevel models of rolling bearings.features of materials is very important for RCF investigation.At the microlevel,the rolling bearing materials are polycrystal,consisting of randomly shaped and sized grains,which can't be properly analysed by the classical finite element method.Therefore,in this research,a new finite element method is developed based on Voronoi diagram to simulate the microstructure of bearing materials.The main contents of this paper are as follows:1?Using MATLAB and ANSYS methods,an accurate model of rolling bearing is established based on Voronoi diagram.The model uses Voronoi cell to represent the grain of the rolling bearing material.The inhomogeneity microstructure of rolling bearing is based on the inhomogeneity microstructure of Voronoi cell.2.20 finite element models with different microstructures of rolling bearing based on Voronoi diagram are established.After simulating,it is found that the contact fatigue life of rolling bearings is in accordance with the Weibull distribution.By setting different initial conditions,it is found that the inhomogeneity of material properties leads to the increase of the degree of dispersion of fatigue life of rolling bearings.The initial flaws of the material result in a decrease in the fatigue life of rolling bearings and an increase in the life dispersion.3?Based on the theory of damage mechanics,the damage mechanics constitutive relation of rolling bearings is established.Then the damage mechanics model of rolling bearings based on Voronoi method is established on ANSYS software.It is found that the method established in this paper can be applied to analyze the fatigue life of rolling bearings by comparing the simulating results with those obtained by Gazizulin et al and the results by L-P theory.