The future trend of rolling mill bearings

Jan 20, 2025

The common features of rolling mill bearings are high load, impact load, and high temperature environment, or high speed and high temperature. The actual working life of bearings is often lower than their theoretical life. The use of bearings in brand new equipment often results in a very long bearing life. Outdated equipment and rolling mill parts with poor precision will consume a large amount of bearings. These rolling mill bearings are very unfortunate. The most common form of bearing damage is fatigue in the main load area of the raceways. As wear intensifies. Larger metal debris hinders the normal rotation of the bearing. Eventually completely scrapped.

The problem that bearing manufacturers will need to solve in the future is "how to make the bearing raceway stronger?".

1. Upgrading of raw materials for bearing components

The minimum standard for material purity of rolling mill bearings is pure steel manufactured using vacuum degassing smelting (VD) process.

If the composition segregation of continuous casting bars cannot be well controlled. So mold cast hot-rolled bars are still a better choice. The density of molded bars is higher, and the chemical composition is more evenly distributed. Manufacturing bearings is more reliable.

More steel grades for bearing factories to choose from: 20 types of high carbon or low-carbon alloy steels will become commonly used materials from abroad. And the supply of various sizes of bar materials is smooth.

Bearing factory has put forward special customization requirements to the steel plant. Requirement due to national standards. Strictly control the content of harmful components or scientifically increase beneficial special metal materials in appropriate amounts. For example, adding a small amount of vanadium (V) to 100Cr6 or SAE4320 will improve the fatigue resistance of the bearing raceway.

2. Heat treatment of bearings

The main quality control requirements for previous heat treatments were hardness and metallographic structure. The future heat treatment will be more diverse and complex. Bearing engineers will gradually realize that various heat treatment processes such as martensitic quenching, bainitic quenching, surface nitriding, gas carburizing, gas carbonitriding, and sulfurization will bring different quality feedback to bearings. This is one of the most core technologies in bearing manufacturing.

3. More surface technology applications

Previously, bearing manufacturing mostly involved forging technology, stamping technology, heat treatment technology, machining and grinding technology. With the continuous exploration of application conditions by bearing factories. Strengthening the weaknesses of bearings will greatly improve their working life. This has nothing to do with brand price and brand influence. We once conducted a comparative experiment at work. FV bearings was provided large four row cylindrical roller bearings to Baosteel Group in China. Successfully replaced the Japanese brand. The working life has been doubled. The support roller bearing for this low-speed heavy load always experiences track slip and wear. Poor adhesion of oil film. FV bearings have achieved great success by adding a special manganese based phosphating coating to the bearing raceway.

Future bearing manufacturing will definitely integrate more disciplines. Currently, many coating-technologies have been applied in the bearing industry.

4. Further upgrade of manufacturing accuracy

With the continuous elimination and upgrading of industrial machine tools, the manufacturing accuracy of bearings is constantly improving, and the batch size stability is also improving. The minimum precision of future bearings will be P6 or higher. Bearings with higher precision have better dimensional consistency, resulting in less vibration and noise during bearing rotation. Better quality.

5. Design improvements

The continuous erosion of bearings by water and dust. Many open type bearings can be replaced by new sealed bearings. The bearing has a protective system, and the calculated load of the bearing does not have a significant impact. In addition, the sealing material can also be scientifically selected according to the working temperature of the bearing. According to relevant big data statistics, the average actual lifespan of sealed bearings is twice as long as that of open bearings

FV Bearing is committed to solving users' pain points and providing high-quality bearing materials. Not only should we have price competitiveness, but we should also propose innovative manufacturing solutions to solve problems for our customers. Welcome to contact our FV sales and service engineers.