Cylindrical roller bearing cage pocket lubrication

The objectives of this investigation are to determine the effects of cage pocket conformality on lubrication in a cylindrical roller bearing (CRB) cage. A custom Bearing Cage Friction Test Rig (BCFTR) was configured with a sealed enclosure to emulate a lubricant bath environment. The enclosure was designed to accommodate CRB raceway segments and swappable cage pockets with adjustable roller-pocket clearance. Three transparent cage segments were fabricated with differing pocket conformality with respect to the roller surface. A high-speed camera was used to visualize the in-situ lubricant flow within the roller-pocket contact for all cage types. An equivalent two-phase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model was developed using Ansys Fluent software. The CFD results corroborated well with the experimentally observed trends of lubricant distribution and cage pocket friction. The findings demonstrated that the impact of pocket conformality was two-fold. The least conformal pocket design experienced minimum pocket friction. However, the same design introduced challenges with retaining lubricant at the roller-pocket contact and increasing air entrapment in the oil.