This work presents an investigation on the influence of pitting in EHL rolling contact. The pitting geometry comes as an extension on the architecture for multi-physical numerical calculations of rolling element bearing contacts based on OpenFOAM. The model utilized is built according to the state-of-the-art for fluid–solid interaction and electro-quasi-static fields. In this framework, the contact is reduced to be two dimensional in order to reduce the computing costs needed. The changes in the electric properties, which are caused by pittings, are measured using the electric capacitance of the contact and put in perspective with regard to the EHL contacts geometry. The investigation delivers an evaluation on how surface degradation, in both the pitting width w and pitting depth d of the contact, affects the electric properties. It can be seen that the maximum deviations with different reduced radii for the same pitting structures are around 5% and would therefore hardly be distinguishable with corresponding measurements. By comparing the same data for the same ratio of pitting width to reduced radius, on the other hand, differences of up to 50% can be seen.

This work presents an investigation on the influence of pitting in EHL rolling contact. The pit-ting geometry comes as an extension on the architecture for multi-physical numerical calculations ofrolling element bearing contacts based on OpenFOAM. The model utilized is built according to thestate-of-the-art for fluid-solid interaction and electro-quasi-static fields. In this framework, the con-tact is reduced to be two dimensional in order to reduce the computing costs needed. The changesin the electric properties, that are caused by pittings, are measured using the electric capacitanceof the contact and put in perspective to the EHL contacts geometry. The investigation deliversan evaluation on how surface degradation, in both the pitting width w and pitting depth d ofthe contact, affects the electric properties. It can be seen that the electrical capacitance changeof different initial geometries has different gradients; both in terms of absolute pitting geometrieslike pitting width w and pitting depth d and relative compared to the reduced radius w/R_r.