Relationship of Inclusions and Rolling Contact Fatigue Life for Ultra-Clean Bearing Steel

  • Feilong SUN ,
  • Ke GENG ,
  • Feng YU ,
  • Haiwen LUO
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  • 1.Metallurgical Department of Metallurgical and Ecological Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China
    2.Jiangyin Xingcheng Special Steel Works Co. Ltd. , Jiangyin 214400, China
    3.Central Iron and Steel Research Institute,Beijing 100081, China

Received date: 2019-10-10

  Revised date: 2019-11-15

  Online published: 2019-11-20

Supported by

National Key Research and Development Program of China(2016YFB0300102);International Science and Technology Cooperation Program of China(2015DFG51950);Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities in China(FRF-TP-18-002C2)

Abstract

The cleanliness of bearing steels produced in China has been greatly improved due to the significant progress in the steelmaking technologies in the past decade, leading to their total oxygen (T.O.) contents lowered to no more than 6×10-6. Under such a high cleanliness, it is then expected that the influence of non-metallic inclusions on fatigue property should be different from the previous knowledge, because both the size and quantity of inclusions are reduced greatly. Therefore, both inclusions and fatigue properties for three ultra-clean GCr15 (100Cr6) bearing steels containing T.O. around 6×10-6, which were manufactured via different industrial production processes, were studied for this purpose. First, inclusions were characterized by ASPEX SEM and then statically analyzed by the statistics of extreme values (SEV) and the generalized Pareto distribution (GPD). Next, their rolling contact fatigue lives (RCF) L10 and L50 were measured by flat washer tests. Only the largest inclusion in each sample is required for predicting the characteristic sizes of maximum inclusion (CSMI) for the three steels using the SEV method. The calculated CSMIs, however, are not consistent with the variation of either L10 or L50, indicating they are not relevant. In contrast, the types of inclusions above threshold (u) size can be classified and their number density of inclusions quantified when the GPD method is employed. In particularly, the CSMIs of different types of inclusions can be determined. In this case, it has been found that the CSMI of TiN inclusion, which is the most dangerous for initiating cracking, is in a good agreement with the low probability rolling fatigue life (L10), suggesting that they are very correlated. This, however, cannot explain the variation of high-probability fatigue life (L50). Instead, the density of total inclusions also played an important role on the L50 of ultra-clean bearing steels in addition to the CSMI of TiN inclusions. This is reasonable because cracking shall be initiated at not only the most dangerous TiN inclusion during the early failure but also some other highly dense inclusions particularly during the late failure. Therefore, it is then concluded that the L10 is much more related to the CSMI of most dangerous TiN inclusion; whilst the L50 is strongly affected by the number density of total inclusions.

Cite this article

Feilong SUN , Ke GENG , Feng YU , Haiwen LUO . Relationship of Inclusions and Rolling Contact Fatigue Life for Ultra-Clean Bearing Steel[J]. Acta Metall Sin, 2020 , 56(5) : 693 -703 . DOI: 10.11900/0412.1961.2019.00337

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