Failure Analysis of Universal Joint in Roughing Mill

Abstract

Power transmission system of Rolling Mills consist several components which some-times encounter unfortunate failures. Some common reasons for the failures includemanufacturing and design faults, maintenance faults, raw material faults, materialprocessing faults as well as the user originated faults.During rolling operation, torsional, bending and normal forces come into play onCross and Yoke. These forces produce a combination of cyclic normal and shearstress. These cyclic stresses lead to either the failure of cross or crack in the yoke ofthe joint after every nine to ten months. Replacing which requires large lead timeand hampers the protable productivity of the company.The current work presents the use of Finite Element (FE) based fatigue analysis tolocate the critical point of crack initiation and predict life in Cross piece and Yokethat is subjected to reversible loading. The results calculated analytically are in closeagreement with that found using FEM software.