Investigation on housing chamfer parameters in roller swaging for self-lubricating spherical plain bearings assembly

A lightweight reliable joint is required for the self-lubricating spherical plain bearing which is widely used in aerospace as a key flexible connection. And the roller swaging is a promising process for obtaining the lightweight reliable joint by the plastic deformation. The experimental setup of the roller swaging assembly process and the push-out load inspection tooling were designed and fabricated in this paper. Moreover, the 2D elastic-plastic FE models of roller swaging and push-out test were developed under the Abaqus/Explicit environment for obtaining the metal flow and equivalent strain distribution during the processes. The good agreements of joint condition and push-out load are highlights between the FE simulation and experiment. Based on the results, the optimum designs of the housing chamfer height a and angle α and roller feed distance h were carried out with a typical roller angle β(60°). It can be found that the little chamfer height and angle are beneficial to obtain a good joint condition. However, compared with 45 and 60°, the load-carrying capacity of chamfer angle 30° is reduced by 30% at least. And the inward displacement of the outer race inner surface for chamfer height 0.7H is more than 50% larger than the ones of 1.0H and 1.2H. What is more, the larger roller reduction will enhance the load-carrying capacity and improve the joint condition, but result in a heavily inward metal flow.