Bearings for aerospace applications

Rolling element bearings are the most critical parts of any rotary mechanism. One of the challenges in any bearing design is to minimize the friction and maximize life for a particular service environment. For critical aerospace systems such as jet/liquid rocket engines, bearings are the key to improving performance benchmarks. Though bearings are a common machine element, literature related to criticality of bearings used in aerospace industries is very limited. The selection of precision class of bearings, surface finish and overall quality of critical contact surfaces in bearings, lubricant selection, lubrication scheme, processing of bearings, integration into mechanisms have been discussed in this review. A glimpse of emerging technologies in active bearing systems and smart bearing solutions has been included.