TED E. BAILEY
Detailed Experience Summary at NTN Technical Center
Ted was hired on 1 July 1991 as the Supervisor of the Mechanical Research Group. This position involved the supervision of 4 Engineers and 5 Technicians in a test laboratory with 27 employees. The primary function of the Mechanical Research Group was to conduct evaluation testing of automotive bearing products. The test facilities included a Metrology Lab and a test room with 20+ bearing test machines. The test machines were fully instrumented with vibration monitoring sensors and thermocouples and had a state-of-the-art data acquisition system.
Supervisor Duties (1991-1996)
Daily supervision duties included the scheduling and implementation of metrology and test lab priorities, creating project plans & Gantt charts, writing department budget reports, performance proposals, editing reports written by the Engineers and Technicians, giving tours of the test facility, giving presentations to management on departmental activities and project plans. In addition to his management duties, Ted was also responsible for his own project work (see following section).
Rolling Element Bearing Test & Analysis
Ted's project work included fatigue life testing of ball, cylindrical roller and taper roller bearings on large bearing test machines. Other testing included Rolling Contact Fatigue (RCF) ball on rod testing for the evaluation of bearing materials and coatings such as Diamond-Like-Carbon (DLC) which were applied for bearing life enhancement. Ted worked closely with the Materials Department to develop special bearing products including an extremely long life tapered roller bearing that used premium bearing steels and heat treatments in combination with special surface finishes and roller/raceway crowning.
Ted installed several rolling element bearing software packages on a Windows computer system so that the test lab could properly design rolling element bearings (crowning, internal clearance, surface finish, etc.) and predict elastohydrodynamic behavior of the rolling contacts, bearing internal dynamics and fatigue lives. The rolling element bearing software included A.B. Jones , SHABERTH, COBRA, KMJ Accubearing and internal codes developed by NTN-Japan. Ted also developed analytical spreadsheets to predict rolling element bearing contact load distributions for combined radial and thrust loading, bearing fit up and internal clearance optimization for press fit, thermal and centrifugal effects, equivalent radial loading, bearing fatigue life, etc. These spreadsheets greatly enhanced the analytical capabilities of the NTN Technical Center and filled in many holes that were missing from commercial bearing analysis codes.
The last rolling element bearing project that Ted worked on involved the development of a real time load sensing system for a large mining truck application. This system involved the instrumenting of installed bearings with an array of strain gauges that were calibrated under combinations of radial and thrust loads. Using regression analysis, a strain model was created and input into data acquisition software to allow an operator to view the bearing loads in real time. A patent is pending for this invention.
Ted published two technical papers on rolling element bearings while working at NTC. This included an ASME paper titled: "Prediction of Equivalent Radial Loads for Tapered Roller Bearings" and a SAE technical paper titled: "Bearing Race Load Distribution Optimization".
Ted also represented NTN as a member of the ASME Rolling Element Bearing Life Factor committee and STLE as an associate editor for Tribology Transactions.
Senior Staff Engineer (1996 - 2002)
In 1996, Ted was promoted to the position of Senior Staff Engineer during a reorganization at the NTN Technical Center. Ted's supervision responsibilities were replaced with special project work as Ted reported directly to the Director of Engineering. New responsibilities included the marketing of new products using the Internet as a tool, webmaster of the NTN Technical Center web site, trouble shooting of computer systems, including software debugging and hardware installation on both Windows and Macintosh computers and surveillance of new technology development by industry competitors. Ted also provided analytical support to Engineering in all departments at the NTN Technical Center and at NTN Bearing Corporation of America (NBCA). This support included the development of system models using regression analysis tools and spreadsheets, stress analysis using contact mechanics and FEA (COSMOS), Weibull life analysis of component testing, etc.
Clutch Design & Development
In 1996, NTC was challenged by NTN Japan to abandon rolling element bearing test and development work and quickly design, develop, manufacture, test, and market innovative new non-bearing automotive components or face the prospects of having the lab closed down. Until NTC was shut down in 2002, the facility was transformed into a New Product Development Lab. The Engineering staff mounted a valiant effort to develop innovative new automotive components, including roller ramp and wrap spring clutches.
Ted's role in the wrap spring clutch development effort was to construct a mathematical model so that slip torque, locking torque, wire yield, buckling failure and other parameters could be predicted as a function of geometry, friction coefficient and material properties. A complex model was created, correlated with test data and made into an Excel spreadsheet. This allowed Engineering to quickly optimize conceptual wrap spring clutch designs.
Ted also set up a Windows NT computer system with the MDI ADAMS dynamic modeling software and worked with MDI to develop a working dynamic model of a two belt automotive FEAD system with both a solid pulley and a pulley with a one-way (wrap spring) alternator clutch. The model was closely correlated with test data to simulate belt flap, tensioner arm motion and alternator torque.
One of Ted's final projects was the stress analysis of a roller ramp clutch used in an innovative new automotive transfer case application. The analysis included contact mechanics and FEA of the roller clutch housing using COSMOS. An SAE technical paper ("Development of an Electronically Controlled Two-Way Roller Clutch for Transfer Case Applications") was published in 2001: