Brinelling is a material surface failure caused by contact stress that exceeds the material limit. This failure is caused by just one application of a load great enough to exceed the material limit. The result is a permanent dent or "brinell" mark. It is a common cause of roller bearing

Bearing (mechanical)

A bearing is a device to allow constrained relative motion between two or more parts, typically rotation or linear movement. Bearings may be classified broadly according to the motions they allow and according to their principle of operation as well as by the directions of applied loads they can...

 failures, and loss of preload in bolted joints when a hardened washer is not used. Engineers can use the Brinell hardness of materials in their calculations to avoid this mode of failure. A rolling element bearing's static load rating is defined to avoid this failure type.

A similar-looking kind of damage is called false brinelling

False brinelling

False brinelling is damage caused by fretting, with or without corrosion, that causes imprints that look similar to brinelling, but are caused by a different mechanism...

. This occurs when contacting bodies vibrate against each other in the presence of very small loads, which pushes lubricant out of the contact surface area, and the bearing assembly can not move far enough to redistribute the displaced lubricant. The result is a finely polished surface that resembles a brinell mark, but has not permanently deformed either contacting surface.