Investigation of optimizing arrangement forms for combined angular contact ball bearings

The combined angular contact bearings are widely used in numerous rotating machinery system, but few research works on the combined angular contact ball bearings have been reported. To solve the problem about inconsistency fatigue life of the bearings in the combined bearings with asymmetric arrangement, this paper proposed a special combined bearings arrangement form in which the bearings with different contact angles are used simultaneously for the bearing combination. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a mathematical model is proposed to analyze the load distribution, life and stiffness of the combined bearings, and the combined bearings with three different arrangements are comparatively calculated and analyzed. The results show that the whole life of combined bearings is mainly depend on the life of the bearing under heavy load, and the new arrangement form in which the initial contact angle of the bearing under heavy load is increased that can improve the whole life of combined bearings.