Experimental Study of the Effect of Misalignment on Rolling Element Bearing

Abstract

Any single machine rotary component in the process could result in downtime costs. It is necessary to monitor the overall machine health while it is in use. Bearing failure is one of the primary causes of machine breakdown in industry at high and low speeds. A vibration signature evaluation has historically determined misalignments in shafting systems. These misalignments are also responsible for the bearing increase in temperature. The purpose of this work is to undertake a comparative study to obtain the reliability of the effect of the amount of misalignment on bearing by using thermography measurement. An experimental study was performed in this paper to indicate the existence of machine misalignment at an early stage by measuring the bearing temperature using a thermal imaging camera. The effects of load, velocity, and misalignment on the bearings and their temperature increase have been investigated. The test bench's rolling-element bearing is an NTN UCP213-208 pillow block bearing. It has been observed that by tracking the change of temperature in bearings could lead to misalignment detection and the effect of the amount of misalignment on it.