Experimental investigation of an elastic contact between a layered cylindrical hollow roller and flat plate

Abstract

A novel roller design, a layered cylindrical hollow roller is suggested for roller type bearings, in which a small hollow cylinder is embedded into another large hollow cylinder with the same percentage of hollowness. This paper deals with a theoretical and experimental investigation for the cylinder-on-flat type contact interaction. In theoretical calculation Hertz theory is used for half contact width calculation. While experimental analysis is carried out with the help of “footprint method” for analyzing a real contact area between elastic solids. In footprint method the indentation of the roller on flat plate with regard to the applied load is measured. The theoretical data is compared for the validation of experimental technique. The test results are very close and similar with the theoretical data. With the help of this experimental technique, contact analysis between hollow roller and flat plate and between layered cylindrical hollow roller and flat plate have been carried out. Finally, in this work, experimentally evaluated contact width values are compared between hollow roller and layered cylindrical hollow roller. The experimental results suggested that the layered cylindrical hollow roller has larger contact width as compared to hollow roller with the same outside dimension and hollowness under same compressive loading conditions.