Optimization experiment on polishing of cylindrical roller bearings

Cylindrical roller (CR) bearings are commonly manufactured and used in machine tools operated under high speed and heavy load conditions. The surface quality and shape accuracy of the CR will affect the service life of the bearing. Two processing steps such as rough and fine double-sided polishing are required to improve the quality of CR. The influence of machining parameters includes rotation speed, load, and abrasive size on surface quality of rollers are investigated by experiments. In addition, the surface roughness (SR) of the rollers will be optimized to achieve the best quality. Experiments for the optimization process are performed based on the Taguchi L9 orthogonal array. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is used to investigate the impact of machining factors on output parameters. Then, the regression equation is built to estimate the predicted values of the technological parameters. As a result, the optimum polishing parameters such as the rotation speed of 120 rpm, load of 25 N, and abrasive size of 2.0 mu m are established for machining process. The SR of the AISI 52100 alloy steel roller is rapidly reduced from Ra = 0.15 mu m to Ra = 0.04 mu m under optimum polishing parameter conditions.