If you open your refrigerator or any other household appliance, there is a great chance that it rotates. If the door of your refrigerator can rotate when you open it, it can only do so because there is a small component that enables this rotation. It’s a bearing.
Bearings support the shaft that rotates inside the machinery. At an industrial scale, one can find bearings in automobiles, airplanes, electric generators and so on. Given the aforementioned examples I just provided, it’s easy to see bearings of small size commercialized in the market.
SFK, a developer, designer and manufacturer of bearings, seals and lubrication systems and VBN Components, will explore the use of additive manufacturing for large size bearings.
As you may guess, if Sweden-based company VBN Components is part of this project, it’s certainly because its hard, 3D printed metals will be utilized as part of this production. As a reminder, the company’s unique alloys for additive manufacturing are marketed under the brand name Vibenite.
Both companies have been working together for several years within additive manufacturing of hard and highly wear resistant steels with significantly enhanced fatigue properties. VBN says their cooperation has mainly been focused within aerospace and racing where additive manufacturing has offered several advantages, including less complex and time-consuming manufacturing solutions, as well as environmental benefits.
As part of this project, the company notes that lighter weight components have the potential to improve performance under demanding conditions and will enable further weight optimization of machinery.
The use of the Vibenite materials in the components developed by VBN and SKF is, as a result of the cooperation, also expected to enable significant environmental benefits. Since additive manufacturing makes it easy to produce components from very hard materials, material consumption can in specific applications be reduced by 80–90%.
Johan Bäckström, CEO of VBN Components, says: “SKF’s focus on continuously improving their products has given us the opportunity to test our Vibenite materials in very demanding applications. We are truly pleased to finally make this announcement after several years of successful cooperation.”
The Vibenite materials also have the potential to enable improvements in the material for many other applications. VBN has customers that have increased the lifetime of components by more than ten times, resulting in a significantly reduced CO2 footprint. In collaboration with SKF, Vibenite materials have been shown to provide very good rolling fatigue resistance due to their purity, hardness, and fine microstructure.
Victoria Van Camp, President, SKF Technology Development, says: “At SKF, we are constantly striving to improve the performance of our bearings and VBN’s solutions and material are contributing to this. Our cooperation also brings large sustainability benefits. This means that our customers get better products with lower environmental impact.”
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