PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - QANTAS A380 Uncontained failure.
View Single Post
Old 27th Dec 2010, 01:02
  #30 (permalink)  
Old Engineer
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Virginia, USA
Age: 86
Posts: 77
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
bearfoil

Yes, I was going to try to time-correlate all that data as well, but I just never had time to do it, so Annex14's effort is appreciated.

On another tack on the issue of bearing failure, I noticed an interesting, and possibly pertinent comment among the various FAG glossy brochure literature. Just happened to catch my eye. It's in the brochure on repair of bearings; IIRC a ball bearing is taken as an example. "Rebuilt to as-new standards" and further on "parts replacement not permitted" or word to that effect.

Somewhere, either in the FAG brochures or elsewhere (daughter page lost when IE had to close, before bookmarking), I discovered a useful account of the process by which high precision ball bearing are made. There are a lot of forming, grinding, tempering, regrinding, and finally lapping to make the races accurate to .0001". But apparently this does not always result in the same particular ten-thousandth from piece to piece (which I deduce from the adverse comment against part replacement, above). The same is done with the spherical balls that run between two particular races, but here the finished balls are ingeniously sorted in size down to the quarter of a ten-thousandth (0.000025").

From this I deduce that the selected inner and outer race are measured for the gap between the running surfaces of the balls, and the appropriate quarter-size of the nominal ten-thousandth tolerance ball diameter is selected. That is, the bearing as an assembly may be interchangeable, but its components are not individually interchangeable --not if you want an "as new" rebuilding of the bearing. This last phrase straight from the horse's mouth at FAG-- and please, we'd like the whole engine and 18 days to do it. Even so, it's apparently a substantial saving over a whole new bearing.

From my own experience, I know that even a drop-in whole new bearing replacement will not necessarily result in "as new." That is because the interference fit between bearing housing and outer race can compress the outer race and reduce its diameter. And that depends on just what the outer race diameter of the replacement piece is, not to mention the housing diameter. I see locating tangs are popular here, for locking the race against rotation, to avoid having to rely on a heavier fit to accomplish this. It's enough of a problem that FAG comments that "as new" can only be restored in a factory setting [I read, their factory].

So, suppose the Singapore repair facility just replaced the spalled outer race? That was the damage, IIRC. What then the bearing life?
Old Engineer is offline