A Contact Characteristic of Roller Bearing with Palm Oil-based Grease Lubrication

Grease lubricants are widely used in rolling contact applications to reduce friction between two rolling surfaces. Improper lubrication may cause high contact stress and deformation to the bearings and lead to machine failure The purpose of this study is to investigate the coefficient of friction produced by newly developed palm oil-based grease and to investigate the contact characteristics in lubricated roller bearings. In this work, the coefficient of friction of new greases was evaluated experimentally and the values were compared with the conventional mineral oil-based grease to investigate the friction performance. The friction test was performed using a four-ball tester. The finite element model was developed based on the roller bearing geometry and the simulation was carried out the evaluate the contact characteristic. The experimental result shows that the palm oil grease formulation A had the least coefficient of friction, followed by palm oil grease formulation B, mineral grease and food grade grease. This indicates that palm oil-based grease has the potential to be applied in rolling contact applications due to low friction characteristics. Finite element analysis shows that the maximum von Mises stress and total deformation for frictional contact are higher than the frictionless contact. For the frictional contact analysis with various lubricant COF, similar values were obtained with von Mises stress at 400.69 MPa and 3.4033×10-4 mm deformation. The finding shows that the small difference in grease COF did not affect the rolling contact. The finding also shows that the newly developed biodegradable grease has a similar performance in terms of rolling contact friction and contact characteristic in a condition that the bearing is operating in normal condition.