Method to determine the local load cycles of a blade bearing using flexible multi-body simulation

Conventional methods for designing rolling bearings against fatigue assume that a bearing ring is fully rotating and that the load is ideally distributed over the rolling elements. Blade bearings in wind turbines, are operated under oscillating motions and dynamic loads. The load distribution is strongly dependent on the stiffness of the bearing rings and the surrounding structural components. This has been shown in numerous studies using FEM simulations for static load cases. In this paper a method is presented that reduces the calculation effort of the deformation of the bearing rings, so that a flexible integration into an aeroelastic mbs model of a wind turbine is possible. Thereby an average accuracy of 6.5% between FEM and mbs could be achieved. The model allows the determination of time series of the global load distribution of each raceway. By data processing of the simulation results, the number of load cycles and the maximum contact pressure for individual segments of the raceways could be determined and their fatigue probability could be estimated using the linear damage hypothesis according to Palmgren-Miner.