A leading manufacturer of industrial absorbents was experiencing bearing failures in one of their grinding mills. The grinding mill application is located in a very dirty environment and incorporates an open spherical roller bearing mounted into a specialty housing that contains external seals. The mill is located at the top level of the facility and very difficult to access when problems do arise. After a thorough application review, it was determined that failure was a result of bearing seizure due to contamination ingress introduced during installation.

The NTN Solution

After further scrutiny of application and mounting procedures, NTN’s team determined a sealed spherical roller bearing would eliminate the ingress of contamination during installation. So therefore, NTN recommended the facility switch to our SFCW unit, a 4-bolt flanged, ductile iron unit with a robust sealed spherical roller bearing that has versatile mounting configurations resulting in the proper mounted radial clearance. For this application, the unit was installed similarly to the spherical roller bearing previously used, but since it is sealed and in a unitized housing, the installation time was reduced by 75%, saving on the system downtime as well.

The Result

The NTN solution has been proven to last 4 times longer! The SFCW bearing unit has successfully run for over 24 months without a single failure, compared to the original bearings that were failing every six months. The increased bearing life, decreased downtime and reduced acquisition cost resulted in over $171,000 in annual cost savings.

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