How to avoid premature failure of rolling bearings in mining machinery?

The safe and efficient operation of mining equipment is an important part of production for mining enterprises. Rolling bearings are one of the important components of mining machinery. The use of failed bearings in production can cause severe vibration and noise, as well as damage to related components, ultimately resulting in a series of adverse effects.

The causes of premature bearing failure

The reasons for premature failure of bearings are multifaceted, but the main ones are improper use and maintenance, poor lubrication, pollution overload, impact and impact during assembly, transportation, and disassembly. Pollution is often caused by human factors such as incomplete cleaning of dismantling tools.

Pitting: is the most typical form of bearing failure, mainly caused by ordinary impacts and incorrect assembly during transportation, which can cause indentation on the raceway. When the raceway produces indentations, the rotating rolling element produces an impact every time it passes through an indentation, which has a rolling effect on the indentation. Flaky peeling occurs at the indentation, causing increased vibration and noise. In addition, when there is an external load on the bearing and it does not rotate, external vibration can cause pressure marks on the inner and outer raceways of the bearing. Over time, this can cause the raceways to peel off, and the peeling debris is even more harmful to the bearing. To prevent these accidents from happening, effective methods can be adopted in daily work to eliminate vibration sources or vibrations, maintain good lubrication, apply slight initial loads to bearings, make good contact between rolling elements and rolling, improve seismic resistance, and the different axial degrees with holes during installation can also cause bearing failure.

In practical work, due to poor lubrication or excessive overloading, excessive friction and high production heat can soften the bearing steel, while causing bearing volume expansion and increasing mutual compression pressure. When it reaches a certain degree, the bearing will lock onto the shaft. When the bearing overheats, the gap between the rolling body and the cage bracket decreases, and the stress generated is not only on the cage, but also on the cage. With the extension of time, the cage will also fracture, This accelerates the failure rate of the bearings.

The influence of fit clearance is that the clearance between the shaft and the shaft hole is too large, resulting in relative motion between the two. Firstly, the wear clearance of the fitted shaft segment transitions becomes larger and larger, ultimately leading to bearing failure; The second reason is that bearings produce scratches, which affect the accuracy of motion. These reasons cause premature failure of bearings, which is not conducive to our actual work. Therefore, studying how to avoid premature failure of bearings and extend their service life is of practical value.

How to avoid premature failure of bearings

The most effective way to prevent premature failure of bearings is to minimize the various factors analyzed above and the conditions that contribute to these factors.

Firstly, when selecting bearings before use, consideration should be given to the size of noise, rigidity, longitudinal cracks, and rotational torque.

Selection of lubricating oil:

According to the working environment of the bearing, different lubricating media produce different noises during use. For example, grease lubrication is much more noisy than oil lubrication. Good lubrication is the primary condition for extending the service life of bearings. Proper lubrication can improve the smoothness and accuracy of movement, as well as play a role in vibration absorption and buffering, reducing wear. However, in practical work, pollution of bearings and lubricants is inevitable.

Reasonable assembly is also extremely important for premature failure and extended service life of bearings. There is a significant difference between domestically produced and imported bearings of the same type used in machine equipment, mainly due to the responsibility of materials and processing accuracy, as well as unreasonable assembly. The correctness of the assembly method is directly related to whether the appropriate clearance can be ensured. If the clearance is too small, it will increase the additional torque of the bearing. The increase in angular displacement between the center line of the bearing and the center line of the bearing hole will inevitably deteriorate the working condition of the bearing, and these should be avoided as much as possible.

When the bearing is overloaded, fatigue can also occur early. If the cause of damage is overload, try to choose bearings with high load-bearing capacity during installation and design. And timely maintain and replace according to design requirements.