A Reliability-Based Robust Design Optimization Method for Rolling Bearing Fatigue under Cyclic Load Spectrum

Reliability-based robust design methods have been widely used in the field of product design; however, they are difficult to apply to the fatigue reliability design process of rolling bearings due to the problems of determining fatigue accumulated damage caused by the internal cyclic time-varying load distribution of rolling bearings and the computational cost of time-varying reliability. Therefore, a reliability-based robust design method for rolling bearing fatigue failure is proposed, which derives the formula for fatigue accumulated damage of a rolling bearing under cyclic load spectrum and significantly reduces the computational cost of rolling bearing time-varying reliability compared with existing methods. First, the state response of a rolling bearing under random design parameters is obtained by finite element simulation. Then, the adaptive kriging method is used to characterize the correlation between the random parameters and the state response. The Miner fatigue cumulative damage theory is improved and the rolling bearing fatigue time-varying equation of state under cyclic load spectrum is derived. Subsequently, a fatigue time-varying reliability model based on an improved fourth-order moment method is developed, and a reliability robust optimization design method is proposed. Finally, a rolling bearing example is presented to demonstrate that the method achieves time-varying fatigue reliability design under cyclic load spectrum and effectively improves the reliability and robustness of the product design.