Solution Brief

ACCELERATED NONLINEAR

ANALYSIS FOR BALL BEARINGS

INDUSTRY CHALLENGE

AKSELOS SOLUTION

From hard drives to the Mars Rover and the Hubble Telescope, ball bearings are ubiquitous, so much a part of our life we take them for granted. The bearings are a common part of industrial machine systems. Much of the company’s products are riding on their successful design and use.

When bearings fail to meet their expected life or performance levels, the consequences are far reaching and include increased down time, high maintenance costs, loss of revenue, and missed deliveries.

For that reason, engineers must take particular care to analyze their bearing design to ensure they can endure the extreme stress between the moving parts over the fatigue life. Engineers use finite element analysis (FEA) to understand the types of loads acting on the moving structures, and its ability to withstand repeated loading. Due to the bearings’ nonlinear properties, a detailed analysis using high-fidelity finite element models requires huge computational resources, and is in most cases not computationally feasible. This directly slows down the product lifecycle and hinders the company from understanding how to design and maintain bearings for optimal use.

Akselos Integra™ is up to the job, offering up a robust and fast nonlinear analysis solution. Using Akselos’s Hybrid Solver, engineers can produce extremely complex bearing models with accurate results and can drive forward the reliable design, development, and maintenance of bearings of any size.

Akselos Integra, the world’s leading engineering simulation platform, pushes the boundaries of what modern engineering can achieve. Akselos Integra’s patented algorithms, RB-FEA, enable full, condition-based models of large-scale assets that can be simulated 1,000 times faster than with conventional FEA tools.

For problems where the nonlinearity is related to material property, geometry, and contact, Akselos Integra offers a robust and fast Hybrid Solver which uses FEA to represent nonlinear regions and RB-FEA to represent linear regions within a global 3D model. The speed renders the nonlinear analysis up to 100 times faster than full FEA nonlinear

BENEFITS• Reduces the bottom line by modeling and

analyzing ball bearings without incurring the huge computational costs regularly seen when modeling and analyzing these structures.

• Enables engineers to optimize products more easily through fast 3D contact analysis that helps to reduce friction and extend bearing fatigue life.

• Enables companies to develop more detailed instructions for operating and maintaining bearings for optimal use.

The stress field for localized contact analysis within a RB-FEA model.

analysis. This offers a “best of both worlds” solution to nonlinear analysis. It has the accuracy and flexibility of FEA for nonlinear analysis and brings RB-FEA acceleration to regions of the model in which there is a linear behavior.

MODELINGComponent-based modeling

Modeling ball bearings is a core problem. In order to accurately represent the nonlinearities close to the contact areas in the bearing, a very fine mesh is required. This means the model would very quickly reach the limits of the computing power of today’s computers.

Akselos Integra platform offers a unique component-based modeling method with which engineers can efficiently create large, reusable, and reconfigurable models constructed from smaller, parametrized components. This is key, as the approach can be used without incurring the huge computational costs regularly seen when modeling and analyzing ball bearings.

The component-based modeling approach can be used to create high-fidelity 1D, 2D, and 3D large models (including a combination of 1D/2D/3D elements within a single model) without incurring these computational costs.

For nonlinear analysis, engineers can divide the model into RB-FEA components that will experience linear response and FEA components that will experience nonlinear response based on yield criteria. These features help making the model creation efficient and fast, which can significantly shorten the time, effort, and cost of 3D modeling.

Contact modeling in Akselos Integra includes node-to-node, node-to-surface, and surface-to-surface approaches, and

Ball bearing model with 8.9 million FEA degrees of freedom. For plasticity and contact analysis, 93% of the model is modeled with RB-FEA components that shorten the time, effort, and

frictional effects can be included. The modeling of frictional effects is based on classical Coulomb theory. In addition, the component-based modeling approach allows for different plasticity laws such as linear isotropic and kinematic hardening.

Condition-based modeling

Even the best rolling bearing will fail if its system behavior is not adapted to the machine into which it is integrated. It is therefore necessary to analyze and determine in advance the intensive interactions between bearings and adjacent components. The main challenge is to represent the complex mechanical system of the bearing with sufficient precision in a finite element model.

With Akselos Integra, engineers can quickly produce the most challenging 3D models of existing conditions for an entire structure. They can reliably build a fully detailed 3D model in little time—to ensure against slowdowns-without software limitations. This enables them to capture the ball bearing’s exact function including their load transfer and the touchpoints for the inner and outer races, and areas for deformation.

Also, engineers can rapidly create custom model versions by changing parameters of individual components to support different analysis scenarios. The result: a powerful interface to perform trade-off studies and contingency planning quickly,

Elastic regions

RB-FEA Components

Contact + Plasticity region

FEA Components

Analyzing the load distribution of the bearing is a key task, and is the first step in determining the fatigue life of the bearing. This gives engineers an understanding on whether the bearing should be replaced and redesigned to have a longer fatigue life.

In addition to providing linear analysis capabilities at a 1000x speedup compared to standard FEA, Akselos Integra enables fast nonlinear analysis within large and complex structures using the Hybrid Solver. Using the component-based modeling approach, engineers can use FEA components to model localized contact regions in conjunction with RB-FEA components to model linear regions in the rest of the global model.

ADVANCED ANALYSIS

The model created from hybrid RB-FEA and FEA components provides the accuracy of a full FEA model.

Taking advantage of the fast RB-FEA components, the Hybrid Solver allows for the accuracy and flexibility of FEA for nonlinear analysis and still brings RB-FEA acceleration to regions of the model in which the behavior is purely linear. This frees up computational time while enabling them to gain a deeper confidence in the design.

North America Europe/Middle East/Africa Asia-Pacific

Akselos is a digital technology company headquartered in Switzerland, with operations in Europe, the USA and South East Asia. The company has created the world’s most advanced engineering modelling, and fastest simulation technology, to protect the world’s critical infrastructure today and tomorrow. The technology has the power to revolutionise how we build and manage our critical infrastructure, and pushes the boundaries of what modern engineering and data analytics can achieve. Developed by some of the world’s best minds, the MIT-licensed technology builds something far beyond the capability of a conventional digital twin – a digital guardian that allows operators to not only monitor an asset’s condition in real time, but helps them to see the future.

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About Akselos

Our Akselos Integra platform is a leading engineering simulation platform that revolutionizes asset management and enables you to understand and manage structural safety risk for your

entire asset more effectively than anything else on the market.