Abstract
This paper describes a vibration based diagnostic method for estimating the surface roughness on the race in ball bearings. The surface roughness has been measured bya stylus which directly traverses the surface of the ring obtained by taking apart the ball bearing. We developed a new method to accurately estimate the surface roughness by analyzing the short-length vibration signal which is excited when balls contact with the surface of a defective rotating ring in a ball bearing. Our experimental results confirm that the roughness estimated by the proposed method agrees with that measured directly by using a stylus even in the case of crack jam wide. We applied this new method to the diagnosis of surface roughness in small-sized ball bearings and inferior samples were detected with a 94.7 % accuracy rate.
