Fatigue Failure Distributions for Ball Bearings

Abstract

High reliability requirements of aircraft gas turbine mainshaft ball bearings necessitate reliable methods for estimating fatigue lives in the early failure region of the life dispersion. Economical and rapid comparisons of surface fatigue lives of modern track materials demand extrapolation from limited numbers of rig results, using a statistical distribution which gives reasonable rectification of early failures. The investigation indicates that lognormal distributions are more satisfactory than Weibull distributions for low failure probabilities.