Avoidance of production losses

With up to 20% of all bear­ing issues caused by incor­rect instal­la­tion, main­te­nance staff should first be prop­er­ly trained and, sec­ond­ly, use the right tools. For this rea­son, NSK pro­vides train­ing cours­es for cus­tomer main­te­nance depart­ments. With the main­te­nance and ser­vice pack­age AIP+, the com­pa­ny offers high qual­i­ty, work­able tools for facil­i­tat­ing the typ­i­cal bear­ing tasks found in indus­try. The AIP+ port­fo­lio includes mechan­i­cal and hydraulic assem­bly tools, as well as induc­tion heaters.
If bear­ings have a ten­den­cy to fail while machines are in mid-oper­a­tion, it is often because the opti­mal bear­ing type was not select­ed, or they have not been cor­rect­ly adapt­ed to the appli­ca­tion and/or envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions. Typ­i­cal exam­ples are machines that need fre­quent clean­ing, such as those in the food pro­cess­ing sec­tor. Clean­ing with jets of high-pres­sure water or steam caus­es grease to be flushed out, and con­t­a­m­i­na­tion to pen­e­trate the bear­ings. How­ev­er, these prob­lems can be over­come by using NSK’s Mold­ed-Oil bear­ings, which have the grease durably incor­po­rat­ed in a car­ri­er medium.
With­in the frame­work of AIP, the com­pa­ny can per­form on-site inspec­tion of both bear­ings and oper­at­ing con­di­tions. Com­pa­ny experts then make a spe­cif­ic pro­pos­al on which bear­ings to use, sup­port­ing their rec­om­men­da­tion with a cost analysis.
A case in point can be seen at a Ger­man auto­mo­tive man­u­fac­tur­er, where motor spin­dle bear­ings fre­quent­ly required replace­ment in 15 iden­ti­cal pro­duc­tion cen­tres. NSK dis­cov­ered that the pre­ma­ture fail­ures were caused by exter­nal con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and sug­gest­ed using sealed high-pre­ci­sion bear­ings. As a result, bear­ing fail­ures were reduced dra­mat­i­cal­ly: ser­vice life increased from 12 months to more than 36, which in turn deliv­ered annu­al sav­ings of slight­ly more than €50,000 in instal­la­tion costs alone.
As an alter­na­tive strat­e­gy, con­di­tion mon­i­tor­ing rep­re­sents a more pre­ven­ta­tive approach to pro­long­ing the ser­vice life of bear­ings. The com­pa­ny also offers this ser­vice with­in the frame­work of AIP+, where­by a com­pa­ny ser­vice tech­ni­cian first vis­its the site to record para­me­ters such as vibra­tion, tem­per­a­ture and the speed of machine com­po­nents. Then, using a spe­cial­ly devel­oped mea­sure­ment tech­nique, the tech­ni­cian records and analy­ses the data with the help of pow­er­ful soft­ware in line with a stan­dard­ised pro­ce­dure. The cus­tomer is pro­vid­ed with a com­pre­hen­sive CMS report that includes a descrip­tion of the cur­rent state of the bear­ing. Any shaft align­ment or adjust­ment errors, insuf­fi­cient lubri­ca­tion, or any pre­ma­ture wear in the dri­ve com­po­nents, are also high­light­ed in the report.