Longer life for emergency touchdown bearings
A
The Barden Corporation product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Aug 13, 2004
Barden has combined its wear and corrosion resistant Cronidur 30 steel with ceramic balls to achieve up to ten times the life, plus cost and space reductions for emergency touchdown bearings.
Barden is employing the package of its wear and corrosion resistant Cronidur 30 steel and ceramic balls to achieve up to ten times the life, plus cost and space reductions in the design of emergency touchdown bearings.
The bearings are used as failsafe backups for magnetic bearings in equipment such as turbo molecular pumps, compressors, generators, laser blowers and medical applications.
The increasing use of ultra-high-speed magnetic bearing systems means that the demands on manufacturers of emergency touch down bearings are growing, not only in terms of higher performance, but also to produce bearings, which cost less, consume less space and offer a higher number of touchdowns (ie longer life).
These demands are additional on a bearing type that already has to withstand the harshest of conditions, often being required to accelerate from zero to 40,000rev/min instantaneously, and control high radial, axial and shock loading in order to successfully support a rotor shaft on which magnetic bearings have failed.
With many years experience of producing touchdown bearings for turbo molecular pumps, Barden is uniquely placed to meet the new market requirements.
The company has responded with an optimised design that reduces to a single bearing, the traditional matched pair employed on the lower position of rotor shafts in turbo molecular pumps.
This initiative achieves the twin objectives of reduced cost and space with regard to the bearing assembly.
The further objectives of improved performance and greater life are achieved with a design that combines special materials technology, in the shape of Barden's Cronidur 30 ring material and silicon nitride balls, special internal design, and optimised surface finishing on the bearing raceways, which reduces ball skidding and wear.
Overall, this combination achieves longer life - up to ten times the number of touchdowns, higher reliability, quieter running and greatly improved resistance to corrosion.
The importance of Cronidur 30 to the design is that bearings manufactured from the steel can withstand up to 40% higher dynamic loads, achieve higher constant operating speeds and are up to 100 times more corrosion resistant than bearings manufactured from AISI 440C, the standard corrosion resistant bearing steel.
Bearings manufactured from Cronidur 30 proved themselves in the engines of the NASA space shuttles, and the material has also revolutionised the speed, life, and corrosion performance of angular contact bearings used in pumps and machine tool spindles.
The life and speed performance of Cronidur 30 is optimised in Barden's single row touchdown bearings by the use of silicon nitride (ceramic) balls, which are 60% lighter than steel and offer superior corrosion resistance and reduced ball skidding.
The use of ceramic rolling elements improves significantly the kinematics of the bearings.
Centrifugal force is reduced dramatically and vibration and heat build up are much lower.
In addition, the lower inertia of ceramic balls enables substantially higher acceleration to be achieved, together with operating speeds up to 15% higher than equivalent steel-balled high-speed bearings, and an astonishing 55% faster than traditional angular contact bearings of similar size.
Finally, the superior tribological properties of the ceramic ball material (they are tribochemically inert) enable "cool running" which can extend the service life of the hybrid touchdown bearings by a factor of five.
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Contact The Barden Corporation
Tel +44 1752 735555
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