Rolling contact fatigue damage detected by correlation between experimental and numerical analyses

A study on vibrations related to rolling contact fatigue test bench and a possible way to correlate this mechanical behavior and damage of the specimens is presented. In particular it has been evaluated the possibility to detect and quantify, thanks to vibration analysis, the damage on two discs subjected to rolling contact fatigue in different working conditions. Paper is divided in two parts. In the first part there is a description of test bench and results of its static and modal analyses. Then, some tests were carried out changing working conditions and specimens' parameters and a procedure that allowed both to monitor the specimen's damage state and to record accelerometric data was implemented. A set of piezoaccelerometers was placed on the machine and a virtual instrument for automatic data handling and analysis was performed. Taking into account the FEM results derived from the first part of work, data were analyzed both using a standard approach and by implementing custom digital weighting filters for a windowed RMS in order to define, real-time during the measurement, a good estimator for the specimen damage state development.