低トルク円すいころ軸受の開発

（ころ大端面にマイクロディンプルを施した場合）

抄録

Tapered roller bearing is used for various industrial machines because of its high rigidity. However, the tapered roller bearing has a weakness that running torque is larger than that of a ball bearing. The reason is that the bearing has sliding contact area between the large roller end face and the large inner flange face. Thus, authors attempted to reduce the running torque by processing micro dimple on the large roller end face of the tapered roller. Micro dimples were formed with a diameter of 6 ± 0.3μm and a depth of 2 ± 0.2μm with five types of intervals for the dimples: 30, 40, 50, 70, and 100μm. In this paper, the authors examined the effect of interval of dimples to running torque with changing the interval of dimples. As a result, it was verified that the running torque became lower than that of all current products. The torque at the interval of 40μm took a minimum value. The torque at of 0.9N·m, which was about 60% of that of current product. When the interval of dimples increased further out, the torque increased and the value at 100μm was about 1.2N·m.