Early failure detection for bearings in electrical environments

Bearings in electrical environments have been the subject of many publications. These bearings tend to be the victims of early failure in many different applications. In some cases, insulating or grounding the bearings can prevent the failure, but in other cases, especially in combination with the failure mechanism of white etching cracks, no definitive final answer has yet been proposed. In this work, a test-rig that can create white etching cracks in combination with an electric load is used to test a newly developed electrostatic sensor and to further investigate the root causes of the mechanisms of white etching crack formation for early failure detection.