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Sustainability is the focus of most engineering projects nowadays. The challenge of taking the efficiency to its maximum, in order to reduce the CO₂ emission, became so hard that even a minor innovation is a relevant step. Among the efficiency villains in automotive branch it is possible to quote the mechanical friction losses. One of the main factors concerning to these sort of losses is the contact pressure in rolling bearings. This pressure is highly influenced by singularities on raceways. Different geometry profiles can be a friction source, affecting the usage and leading to a wasteful exploitation. This paper aims to scrutinize the influence that different abnormalities on raceways has on the contact pressure of high speed and low load axial ball bearings. The study will be based on numerical simulations on a contact calculation software. The contact pressure will be evaluated around the edges of dented, bulged, grooved and ridged profiles.

One of the great challenges of engineering teams nowadays is to overcome long and costly project experimentation phases. One effective way of decreasing such project demands is to come up with a firsthand prototype with high success probability. In order to do so, the project team should rely on robust numerical models, which can represent most of the real-life product behaviors, for instance system dynamics. For rolling element bearings, such dynamic models have to consider the dynamic interactions between its components, i.e., rolling elements and raceways. The only vibration transmitting points on rolling element bearings are the lubricated contacts. Therefore, in order to represent the full bearing dynamic behavior on a numerical model, an efficient transient contact model, which depicts the actual contact behavior, is fundamental.