Switching to Molded-Oil bearings

High­light­ing the ben­e­fits that can be achieved by using Mold­ed-Oil bear­ings from NSK, a British snack food man­u­fac­tur­ing plant is sav­ing more than €52,000 a year after replac­ing the exist­ing bear­ings in a sev­en-track con­vey­or system.
It is well estab­lished that the fre­quent clean­ing cycles of machines in the food pro­cess­ing indus­try cur­tail the life of stan­dard bear­ings. Under these harsh con­di­tions, NSK´s Mold­ed-Oil bear­ings are a more suit­able choice as they pre­vent the pen­e­tra­tion of water and contamination.
Able to tes­ti­fy to the advan­tages on offer is a British snack food plant that has tripled the ser­vice life of its con­vey­or bear­ings. The stan­dard deep groove ball bear­ings in a sev­en-track con­vey­or sys­tem were last­ing for only four months due to water that had seeped into the bear­ings dur­ing dai­ly washouts. These bear­ing fail­ures were result­ing in cost­ly main­te­nance work and dam­age to ancil­lary equip­ment, includ­ing con­vey­or belts.
For each bear­ing replace­ment, pro­duc­tion down­time of 14 hours had to be sched­uled, with two tech­ni­cians occu­pied for 12 hours each to per­form the nec­es­sary removal and instal­la­tion. Three times a year, a total of 84 bear­ings required replace­ment, which gen­er­at­ed con­sid­er­able main­te­nance costs and pro­voked exces­sive­ly long and fre­quent machine downtime.
The snack food plant duly asked NSK to inspect the bear­ings and envi­ron­men­tal oper­at­ing con­di­tions. As part of NSK´s AIP (Added Val­ue Pro­gramme), a thor­ough appli­ca­tion review and failed bear­ing analy­sis were per­formed by com­pa­ny engi­neers that con­firmed water ingress as the cause of the pre­ma­ture bear­ing fail­ures. A rec­om­men­da­tion was sub­se­quent­ly made to replace the bear­ings with Mold­ed-Oil lubri­cat­ed bear­ings man­u­fac­tured from stain­less steel, fea­tur­ing DU seals on both sides. These bear­ings are ide­al­ly suit­ed to appli­ca­tions which are in fre­quent and heavy con­tact with water.  Impor­tant­ly, the lubri­cant with­in Mold­ed-Oil bear­ings is durably incor­po­rat­ed inside a sta­ble car­ri­er medi­um, name­ly an oil-impreg­nat­ed poly­ofin resin. This type of lubri­cant can­not be washed away by steam or liq­uids, and pre­vents con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from enter­ing the bear­ing. More­over, as the car­ri­er only releas­es the lubri­cant slow­ly, suf­fi­cient lubri­ca­tion is main­tained over a long oper­at­ing peri­od. A fur­ther ben­e­fit is that the oper­at­ing envi­ron­ment remains clean as no grease can leak out and no oil refill­ing is need­ed. The high­ly effi­cient DU seals on each side also play a part in pro­long­ing the ser­vice life of the bear­ings under harsh conditions.
As a result of the change, the oper­at­ing life of the con­vey­or bear­ings has tripled, ris­ing from 3 to 12 months. In turn, main­te­nance costs relat­ing to the bear­ings, includ­ing sys­tem down­time, have been reduced by €52,203 euros per year.
This yet again con­firms one of NSK´s “rules of thumb”: in appli­ca­tions where the envi­ron­ment is con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed by mois­ture and dust, the ser­vice life of Mold­ed-Oil bear­ings in stain­less steel is more than twice that of bear­ings with con­ven­tion­al grease lubrication.