Andrew Mynett, Distribution Sales & Key Account Manager
Innovation is at the heart of the work that SKF do, with the team consistently striving for excellence and progress, ensuring that we continue to deliver products and services to our partners and customers that meet and exceed their expectations.
The partnership between SKF and Hayley goes from strength to strength and has been built on jointly delivering quality value-added solutions to our customers. This has created a solid base for us to move forward into 2022.
Innovation for the food & Beverages Industry
Innovation never stops at SKF and the coming year is no exception. Here we look at several notable product lines to watch out for. Innovation isn’t always about new technology. Using proven technology in new products is often the quicker and safer way forward. At the same time, striving for safe production environments is vital to meeting industry regulations and avoiding product recall.
An SKF survey of food and beverage producers and OEMs, in a wide range of sub segments, reveals significant concern about the lack of a Deep Groove Ball Bearing that is compliant with food standards, in pre and post processing production environments. More than 90% of the respondents expressed a strong need for food grade bearings, throughout their facilities*.
The SKF Food line ball bearings have sealing technology that minimizes the risk of grease escape from the bearing. Should leakage occur, our NSF H1 compliant, food grade grease is permitted for incidental food contact. Unforeseen seal damage is detectable through the use of blue material, which is, of course, made of food grade compounds.
Combining expertise in bearing design, tribology, metallurgy, lubrication and manufacturing, SKF engineers spent years maximizing the service life of SKF Explorer bearing. The result is a new level of excellence, in both bearing performance and precision manufacturing. Still unmatched in the marketplace, SKF Explorer bearings offer: maximized rating life, higher running accuracy than ISO standard, as well as exceptional strength and durability.
SKF Cooper Split Spherical Roller Bearings
Another SKF innovation that enables businesses to reduce mean time to repair and improve worker safety is the SKF Cooper split spherical roller bearings. The mining, mineral processing and cement industries put demanding operating conditions on machinery. Extreme temperatures, heavy loads and contamination pose serious challenges for rotating equipment and their bearings. The fact that these bearings are also often difficult to get to when replacing, means costly down time – and great safety risks for the workers involved.
In these mining and cement plants, the conveyor is by far the most troublesome asset type. One problem is grease consumption; conveyors typically use standard open pulley bearings, which require large amounts of grease to purge contamination. What’s worse, open bearings have a relatively short service life and therefore normally don’t last as long as the pulley lagging itself. Premature bearing failure of course means frequent need of repairs – and replacement. And here’s the worst part: bearing replacement in conveyors is time consuming and costly in terms of lost production.
Since bearings are often situated in places that are hard to reach, it can take up to 24 hours to replace them! In short: fighting contamination, reducing the amount of lubrication and speeding up repair time are crucial challenges for the mining, mineral processing and cement industries. An equally important objective of these industries is to reduce the number of workplace accidents. And the main cause of these accidents is actually maintenance and repairs; industry studies have found that 43% of all accidents and 24% of all fatalities occur while maintenance is done on conveyors. Solutions that increase machinery reliability and reduce workers’ exposure to hazardous conditions are important to all industries.
The SKF Cooper split spherical roller bearing will help you do just that, the split design enables the in-situ replacement of bearings in machinery, thereby reducing downtime, maintenance costs and risks to worker safety. And our sealed variant greatly reduces the need for lubrication and provides effective protection against contamination.
First For Bearings
This article features in Issue 5 of First For Bearings magazine, the official publication of Hayley Bearing Solutions. View this issue online, or download it, by clicking the button below.
