IMPCO Machine Tools, Lansing, Mich., received orders for five microfinishing systems to be delivered to the OEM plants in Mexico and the USA. Order total is $3.5 million. Each robot-loaded system is designed to microfinish the bearing diameter to millionths of an inch (1 µm) on a family of 300 mm rotor shafts used in the drivetrain of electric vehicles.
Gastops is supporting Virtual Vehicle's latest initiative in conducting high performance engine test cell research and development, supplying custom oil debris monitoring solutions with MetalSCAN.
KISSsoft Release 2022 will be launched in June. The beta release, available now, gives users a first impression of the new KISSsoft features and includes numerous new software functionalities.
A reader wonders about gears where the tops of the teeth are the bearing surface, as used in spur gear differentials. Do they require any special construction or processing?
Bearings ain't beanbag. They are complicated. They are big-business. They are often counterfeited. They are used in virtually anything that moves.
But it is the "complicated" part that
challenges OEMs, job shops and other
operations, and, most of all, their
employees. Add to that the countless
other entities around the world that are
intimately involved with bearings and
you can arrive at a semblance of an idea
of just how important these precious
orbs can be to a successful operation.
Understanding the morphology of micropitting is critical in determining the root cause of failure. Examples of micropitting in gears and rolling-element bearings are presented to illustrate morphological variations that can occur in practice.
Gearbox performance, reliability, total cost of ownership (energy cost), overall impact on the environment, and anticipation of additional future regulations are top-of-mind issues in the industry. Optimization of the bearing set can significantly improve gearbox performance.
In epicyclic gear sets designed for aeronautical applications, planet gears are generally supported by spherical roller bearings with the bearing outer race integral to the gear hub. This article presents a new method to compute roller load distribution in such bearings where the outer ring can’t be considered rigid.
For more than 10 months, NASA ground engineers and International Space Station (ISS) astronauts have been
struggling with a perplexing malfunction of one of the station’s two solar array rotary joints (SARJ).
In the 1960's and early 1970's, considerable work was done to identify the various modes of damage that ended the lives of rolling element bearings. A simple summary of all the damage modes that could lead to failure is given in Table 1. In bearing applications that have insufficient or improper lubricant, or have contaminants (water, solid particles) or poor sealing, failure, such as excessive wear or vibration or corrosion, may occur, rather than contact fatigue. Usually other components in the overall system besides bearings also suffer. Over the years, builders of transmissions, axles, and gear boxes that comprise such systems have understood the need to improve the operating environment within such units, so that some system life improvements have taken place.
