NSK UK Ltd

A manufacturer of frozen pizzas was experiencing failures every four weeks on the belt tensioner serving one of its food conveyors. However, a simple change to NSK moulded-oil bearings resulted in significantly prolonged operating life, leading to annual cost savings of €15,360.

Suffering from regular bearing failures on a feed conveyor at an animal feed production plant, the company’s maintenance team contacted NSK to see if the issue could be resolved. The investigations conducted by the team of specialists at NSK revealed the underlying cause of the problematic failures, and generated savings of over €13,000, thanks to the elimination of machine downtime.

Bearings are highly-stressed drive components which, over a period of time, become susceptible to wear. With this in mind, it is particularly important to include bearings when developing a maintenance plan, as this strategy will help extend the operating life of machinery or equipment.

Monitoring the condition of bearings is not only a way to detect the need for their replacement, but a way to draw conclusions about the state of the entire machine or system. To illustrate the benefits of NSK’s Condition Monitoring Service (CMS), two practical examples highlight what can be offered to users of grinding machines.

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.

The mounting of bearings is a practice that requires the correct knowledge and skills. Historically, this task has seen maintenance personnel make a certain amount of mistakes, which consequently have reduced the lifespan of bearings.

Faced with regular bearing failures on the blade support of a concrete pipe slotting machine that would cause eight hours of downtime each time, the UK-based company in question turned to NSK for assistance. 

When a manufacturer of centrifugal pumps for water treatment applications was developing a new high speed design, it could not understand why test-rig trials indicated a higher running temperature than the original concept. Duly concerned, the company contacted NSK, which sent an AIP+ (Added Value Programme) expert to the company’s site in France to perform a full vibration analysis. 

When a UK-based electricity producer was experiencing frequent breakdowns due to bearing failures in two industrial fan units, the plant requested the services of NSK to propose and implement a suitable solution. After performing an application review as part of NSK’s AIP (Added Value Programme), a change of bearing and fixing arrangement led to significant cost savings.

In the food industry, comprehensive cleaning regimes are commonplace, as companies look to meet stringent sector requirements on hygiene. However, such practises can prove detrimental to production line components, not least the bearings that provide motion in critical machinery, equipment and systems. 

The issue of repeated spindle bearing failures on four CNC machining centres at an automotive plant has been solved by NSK. Having identified the root cause of why the spindle bearings were failing every two weeks, the facility is now enjoying savings of €32,880 per annum.

The newly updated version of a key industry resource for users of rolling bearings across Europe is now available, the revised and renewed Rolling Bearings catalogue from NSK. This essential 700+ page guide to rolling bearing technology is available as an online E-Book and in print.

Expanding its online training platform, the NSK academy has added a new AIP+ tutorial. The induction heater module is the latest to join other AIP+ (Added Value Programme) maintenance and service tool tutorials already available on the site. NSK´s specially developed training modules help registered academy users discover how AIP+ tools can be used to maximum advantage.

As frequent failures can occur on the centrifugal pumps for water recirculation of a large CHP (combined heat and power) plant in Romania, the company asked NSK and its local distributor to perform an on-site bearing investigation. The outcome identified poor lubrication of the pump bearings as the source of the failures, with NSK recommending the adoption of sealed-for-life bearings featuring DDU seals and high-temperature grease.

With direct relevance to the wind energy sector, international accredited registrar and classification society DNV GL has confirmed that roller and ball bearings made of NSK´s Super-TF material exhibit significantly higher dynamic load ratings. Such is the effect of the higher load rating that bearing service life is effectively doubled in wind turbine applications.

After the launch of the NSK academy online training platform last year, a further new AIP+ tutorial module has been added to the site: the LAS-Set laser alignment tool for shafts. All of NSK´s specially developed tutorials outline the optimum way to use the innovative range of maintenance and service tools that form an integral part of the company´s AIP+ Added Value Programme. Essentially offering a guide to best-practice bearing care, each tutorial explains how to realise and maintain the profitable operation of machinery.

The significant increase in reliability of bearings is permitted through the use of application-specific bearing steels and surface treatments, which in turn contributes to the reduction of machinery and equipment TCO (total cost of ownership). For high-performance bearings, the selection and optimisation of (steel) materials plays a central role in their development. For this reason, materials engineering is one of four core research and development technologies at NSK.

With linear speeds twice as fast as conventional balls screws in this type of application of up to 3m/s NSK has introduced what it claims to be the world´s fastest high-load ball screw. The latest additions to the HTF-SRE and HTF-SRD series mean that the clamping and dynamic axes of all-electric plastic injection moulding machines can now benefit from faster acceleration and higher final speed.

An automotive component manufacturer has optimised the drive systems in its machining centres with help from NSK, a move that led to six times greater service life and annual savings of approximately €266,000.

In agricultural machinery when a standard rolling bearing is installed the prospects of long service life are fairly poor.It is because of this, that most high-end OEMs in the agricultural industry rely on customer- and application-specific rolling bearings from NSK. NSK´s Agri Disc Hubs are filled with a special, high-performance grease that is capable of absorbing high pressure and therefore last throughout the useful life of the bearing.