Abstract With the modern machinery towards the direction of high-speed development , the "thermal" issues of mechanical transmission system and its components is increasingly important. Ball bearing is one of the main part of rotating machinery system, and is a more easily damaged parts. So bearing thermal fault detection is essential. If inside the bearing friction thermal and high temperature environment incoming the bearing internal heat can not be effectively disseminated, the bearings may be because of the surface of the raceway and rolling body surface damage leading to early scrapped . For example, the bearing system in the case of loss of lubrication and the work of the high-speed operation, lead to bearing parts inside temperature rising sharply , resulting in the failure of the bearing . In the final analysis, many of the bearing form of failure because of "thermal" generated. So find out internal heating mechanism of bearing system parts, heat transfer process and temperature distribution, which part a higher temperature readily rendered ineffective hazardous parts , you can do early to stop, and may also be submitted to these parts have a targeted design solution, and for these parts have a targeted design solution is proposed, so as to improve the technological process or structural materials , in order to improve bearing life and reliability. In this paper, the Infrared thermal imaging was used to carry out the initial steady state thermal analysis for the poeration state of ball bearing, and the vibration frequency experiment was then carried out to prove the practicability and simplicity of infrared thermal imaging technology. Finally, the finite element simulation technology was used to carry on the analysis of the temperature field for the working condition of bearing, and by the finite element analysis technology, a distribution of temperature field was preliminarily determined under the working condition of bearing , which was compared with the result of thermal infrared imaging. By comparison of the results, the accuracy of the infrared thermal imaging technology wa further proved, which provided the valuable reference for the fault detection of bearing in the future.