Development of an experimental system to measure the cage slip of cylindrical roller bearing

Although the cage slip of cylindrical roller bearings has been measured and studied experimentally, it is difficult to use current experimental measurement to detect the cage slip of the bearing in actual service or engineering environment. The problem is attributed to the limit on the space for current test instruments that can be installed arbitrarily in laboratory, but not in actual environment. A novel measurement based on strain detection is presented. This measurement can be used to obtain the cage slip of the bearing in service or large bench test. The technique is demonstrated and validated in principle by an experimental system. The system is developed to obtain the strain signal of the outer ring in loaded zone as well as the speed signal of the cage and the inner ring at the same time. Under given test load–speed conditions, the cage slip based on strain detection was compared with the cage slip based on speed detection. Experimental results showed that cage slip ratio curves based on strain responses agreed very well with those based on speed signals. In this way, it is revealed that frequency characteristics of strain signals can be used to obtain internal cage slip of cylindrical roller bearings.