Modeling of Heat Phenomenon in Rolling Kinematic Pairs Using the Finite Element Method

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper deals with a difficult problem, referring to the heat generation and propagation in rolling bearings. The bearing dynamics is deeply correlated to three elements: rolling parts, raceways and lubricant. Therefore, the friction coefficient, contact pressure and sliding/rolling speeds on balls-races  are interdependent and the energetic transfer perspective may differ. The validation through the experiments is interesting and promising. However, a general model in heat transfer in rolling bearings remains a discussion topic.

Line 208 : What are the fundaments to settle the values of c and n? More explanations, please.
                  What about the viscous friction coefficient and the lubrication regimes? Perhaps, more details would be of interest

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Reviewer 2 Report

The reviewer recommend accept after minor revision. Some comments are listed at the follow:

1. What is HSC in the Abstract? Please give the full texts in the first place.
2. In order to attract readers' interest, please brief the key results and the most important conclusion in the abstract.
3. The paragraphs of this article need to be revised substantially because there are too many paragraphs with only one to three sentences.
4. Line 165, k1 = k2 = k, right?
5. In the article, the decimal point of all values is comma, which is a very stupid mistake.
6. The Conclusion should emphasizes on the following three goals claimed by the authors in the section 4. Subject of study,
   1. to answer the question: does the modeling of heat sources in the bearing and the modeling of the phenomenon of contact of balls with raceways have a significant impact on heat flows, especially on the temperature distribution?
   2. to answer the question: does the bearing temperature have a significant influence on the resistance to motion?
   3. to search for the relationship between the thermal deformation of the bearing elements and the temperature.

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Reviewer 3 Report

Your final FEM simulation (Fig. 10 with heat convention) doesn't include the thermal deformation effect, which has an influence on the clearance. But the experimental and numerical comparison is quite good (Fig. 14a). Maybe I skipped the smth. from your idea? Based on this assumption, results in Fig. 14c for TorExp are quite expected, but for TirExp is quite strange (9000 rpm point), but no conclusion in the text.

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