Stiffness Calculation and Application of Spline-ball Bearing

Spline-ball bearing is widely adopted in large precision instruments because of its distinctive performance.For the sake of carrying out detail investigation of a full instrument system,practical stiffness formulae of such bearing are introduced with elastic contact mechanics,which are successfully applied for calculating the stiffnesses of the bearing used in the astronomical telescope.Appropriate treatment of the stiffnesses of such bearing in the finite element analysis is also discussed and illustrated.