A STUDY OF HALL ELEMENT METHOD FOR BALL MOTION IN A BALL-BEARING

Understanding actual ball motion in a ball bearing is important for tr ibological analysis. In earlier studies, a search coil method was used to detect ball motion, however, three-dimensional ball motion could n ot be obtained. Recently, the Hall element method has been developed t o detect three-dimensional ball motion. In this method, in spite of th e fact that the radial components of the magnetic flux were measured t hrough contact points, a fixed Cartesian coordinate system was used re gardless of the contact condition. In this study, the direction of the contact points was taken into account to calculate the Hall voltage a nd to estimate the error in angular velocity. If the effects of contac t point change are not considered, some errors may occur. The results show that the direction of the contact points considerably affects the angular velocity calculations.