A Study of Hall Element Method for Ball Motion in a Ball Bearing

Abstract

Understanding actual ball motion in a ball bearing is important for tribological analysis.In earlier studies, a search coil method was used to detect ball motion, however, three-dimensional ball motion could not be obtained.Recently, the Hall element method has been developed to detect three-dimensional ball motion.In this method, in spite of the fact that the radial components of the magnetic flux were measured through contact points, a fixed Cartesian coordinate system was used regardless of the contact condition.In this study, the direction of the contact points was taken into account to calculate the Hall voltage and to estimate the error in angular velocity.If the effects of contact point change are not considered, some errors may occur.The results show that the direction of the contact points considerably affects the angular velocity calculations.