Abstract: Rolling contact fatigue is one of early failure modes that usually happen in such mechanical transmission parts as rolling bearings and gears． In addition，inhomogeneities，inclusions and cavities existing unavoidably in engineering materials severely affect the performance of contact pair material． In this paper，a numerical equivalent inclusion method was utilized to analyze the influences of distributed inhomogeneities with the shapes such as el- lipse，rectangle and triangle in x-z section on the stress field of matrix，and rolling contact fatigue quantified by vo- lumetric stress integral was used to explore rolling contact fatigue regularity of heterogeneous materials． The results show that the shapes，Young’s moduli，depths and volume fractions of distributed inhomogeneities，as well as the frictional coefficients，all play an important role in volumetric stress integral of heterogeneous material under line contact loads．

Key words: heterogeneous material, rolling contact fatigue, numerical equivalent inclusion method, volumetric stress integral, line contact