# Experimental Study on Grinding of Inner Raceway of Tapered Roller Bearing Outer Ring

## TL;DR

This paper studies how grinding parameters affect the quality of tapered roller bearing raceways, finding optimal settings to improve surface finish and reduce errors.

## Contribution

A novel mathematical model for surface roughness prediction and optimized grinding parameters for tapered roller bearings.

## Key findings

- Grinding depth most significantly affects surface roughness of the raceway.
- Higher grinding wheel speed and lower workpiece speed improve surface quality.
- Optimized parameters achieved a surface roughness of 0.205 μm.

## Abstract

Tapered roller bearings are widely employed in mechanical structures such as automotive wheel hub units, transmissions, and machine tool spindles, and they have a direct impact on the performance and stability of the equipment. The shape error and surface quality of the bearing raceway, as its working interface, directly affect its service performance. Grinding is an important process in a machining bearing raceway, and the formed roundness error and surface roughness of a raceway affect the workload of subsequent precision polishing processes. In order to reveal the effect of workpiece rotational speed, grinding wheel linear velocity, and grinding depth on the machining quality of the bearing outer ring inner raceway, single-factor experiments and surface roughness orthogonal experiments were conducted. The results were analyzed for range and variance using surface roughness Ra as the evaluation index, and we developed a mathematical model using a regression method for Ra. It has been found that the roundness error and surface roughness of the bearing raceway are improved with the increase in the grinding wheel linear velocity and the decrease in the grinding depth and workpiece rotational speed. The grinding depth has the greatest impact on surface roughness and the most significant effect. Next are the grinding wheel linear velocity and the workpiece rotational speed, while the effect of changes in workpiece rotational speed on roughness is relatively insignificant. The lowest surface roughness obtained under the optimized grinding parameter combination is 0.205 μm.