Effect of bearing sleeve lead-in chamfer, and parallelism on tolerance ring installation

Abstract

Tolerance-ring (T-ring) installation is one of the assembly processes used to assemble a bearingcartridge that consists of one or two miniature ball bearings, a center shaft and a bearing sleeve to the bore ofa hard disk drive (HDD) actuator arm. This process is widely used due to its cost effectiveness, repeatability ofassembly, ease of rework, short cycle time and fulfillment of a resonance performance design requirement. Inthis paper, the finite element (FE) model of a T-ring installation process is proposed. The FE computationalresult of push-in force is compared to that from experiment, and it is found to be acceptable. It is also foundthat the solid elements provide better computational results than the shells. Then this model is further used todetermine the main contributor to push-in force. It is found that the bearing sleeve parallelism has significantimpact on the process but it is somewhat unaffected by the change in the lead-in chamfer.