Abstract
Balls rotate during the rolling contact fatigue so that they are not affected by contact stress alone which occurs around the contact area. In our previous work, we found that the tensile stress occurring around the equator of the ball caused fatigue of the ball itself. Four groups of pre-cracks, whose surface lengths were 140μm, 220μm, 550μm and 700μm, were initiated on ball surfaces and the strength of these pre-cracked balls was measured. The static strengths and fatigue limits of all pre-cracked balls decreased with crack sizes. We concluded that the fatigue caused by a pre-crack located on the equator of the ball surface was important for understanding fatigue of silicon nitride balls. In our present work, carrying out fatigue tests of pre-cracked balls with 220μm cracks at three frequencies (5Hz, 20Hz and 35Hz) we found that the frequency had effect on speeds of the crack growths.
