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 parts in rotating machinery system, and is a more easily damaged part. In this paper, bearing thermal fault detection is investigated in details Using infrared thermal imaging technology to the operation state of the ball bearing, a preliminary thermal analysis, and the use of numerical simulation technology by finite element method(FEM) under thermal conditions of the bearing temperature field analysis, initially identified through these two technical analysis, bearing a temperature distribution in the normal state and failure state. It also shows the reliability of the infrared thermal imaging technology. with valuable suggestions for the future bearing fault detection.