Article ID: 2016.2710
Though the material of rolling element of ball bearing is bearing steel (SUJ2) in general, ceramics (Si3N4) is also used to take advantage of light weight, low-heat-generation and non-conductor. However, ceramics is expensive in comparison with bearing steel. Generally speaking, ceramics ball bearings are applied for expensive machine tools and aircraft engines. Despite the ceramics ball bearings have distinguished characteristics, the reason why the ceramics ball bearing is unfamiliar is its expensiveness. Then, the authors have been making experiments of performance for ceramics ball bearings. In the experiments, the bearing steel balls in deep groove ball bearing 608 are replaced by ceramics balls. The authors think that when the duration of life can be elongated by means of indicating comprehensive superiority of ceramics ball bearing, the longer-term cost will decrease considerably assuming the initial cost of bearing increases. In this paper, increment of vibration acceleration and internal wear volume are investigated. Moreover, oxidation degradation using grease, in which only antioxidizing agent is added, is studied. Consequently, compared with the bearing steel balls, increment of vibration acceleration and internal wear volume became small when using ceramics balls. Furthermore, it was clarified that ceramics ball bearing exert a constraining influence on oxidation degradation of grease and consumption of antioxidizing agent was low.
