Deterministic life models for rolling contact fatigue: a brief review of recent trends

Since material fatigue is one of the main failure modes for rolling bearings, many empirical and analytical models based on rolling contact fatigue (RCF) have been proposed to predict bearing life. As an important branch of the analytical models, deterministic bearing life models for RCF take the stress-strain behavior of materials under contact loading and physical mechanism of fatigue damage into account. These models are used to analyze the rolling bearing failure evolutional progress at a micro-level. The deterministic models may fall into three classes: models based on the crack initiation, models based on the crack growth, and models based on crack initiation and growth. Their features and relevant calculation models are presented respectively, and two new developed modeling methods considering material microstructure are introduced. Problems existing in theoretical modeling and experiments in this research direction are summarized.