Fatigue Life Prediction of Rolling Bearings Based on Modified SWT Mean Stress Correction

Mean stress has a great influence on fatigue life, commonly used stress-based life prediction models can only fit the test results of fatigue life under specific stress ratio or mean stress but cannot describe the effect of stress ratio or mean stress on fatigue life. Smith, Watson and Topper (SWT) proposed a simple mean stress correction criterion. However, the SWT model regards the sensitivity coefficient of all materials to mean stress as 0.5, which will lead to inaccurate predictions for materials with a sensitivity coefficient not equal to 0.5. In this paper, considering the sensitivity of different materials to mean stresses, compensation factor is introduced to modify the SWT model, and several sets of experimental data are used for model verification. Then, the proposed model is applied to fatigue life predictions of rolling bearings, and the results of proposed method are compared with test results to verify its accuracy.