• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.177-182
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• 2015

Tapered roller bearings are widely used in equipment where high combined thrust and radial loads are experienced. A certain amount of tilting between the tapered rollers and the races always occurs because of bending moment load conditions and shaft deflection. It is now well understood that a coherent elastohydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) film separates the rollers and races. In spite of extensive study on EHL problems for over half a century, relatively few studies have focused on the finite line contacts problem. This study presents a complete numerical analysis of the effects of roller tilting on the EHL characteristics in a tapered roller bearing. We systematically analyze this highly nonlinear problem using finite differences with fully non-uniform grids and the Newton-Raphson method. Detailed EHL pressure distributions and film shapes are presented under moderate loads and material parameters. A very small roller tilting significantly affects the pressure distributions and film shapes near both ends of the roller. Moreover, the effect of tilting on the EHL characteristics at the small end is much greater than that at the large end. Therefore, in designing optimum profiles for tapered roller bearings, the profile radius should be larger at the small end.