Research Prize for better prediction of fatigue failure

Thirteen talented young scientists in the Netherlands have become the latest recipients of the Unilever Research Prizes award. These Science students are nominated by their respective universities in the Netherlands for their exceptional research work. Also UT student Tristan Vlogman (MSc Mechanical Engineering) at the Faculty of Engineering Technology. The award was for his research about Multigrid methods with local grid refinement for the calculation of the stress field in roller bearings, leading to better prediction of fatigue failure.

Roller bearings are important machine elements in many engineering applications and prediction of (fatigue) failure is crucial to minimize downtime. “In my research I developed a Multigrid solver with local grid refinement for the roller-raceway contact problem. This enables fast and accurate computation of the stress field in the bearing raceway, taking into account the heterogeneous anisotropic material properties of bearing steel on a microscopic scale.”

It was shown that stress concentrations occur at boundaries of grains with mismatched orientations. For the roller-raceway problem, the use of local refinement leads to typical reduction in compute time in excess of 95% while retaining accuracy. This enables detailed computation of the stress field even on small-scale computers, which can improve the prediction of fatigue failure.