Customers choose mounted bearings because they are easy to install, able to fit most equipment and have lower costs. You’ll typically see two of these units installed on each end of the shaft. The bearings support an applied load while operating at some speed (measured in revolutions per minute). Bearings come in a variety of housing style options such as pillow block, 2 or 4-bolt flanges, take-up units, flange brackets, and others.
Seals Keep Bearings Safe
Regardless of housing type, they’re exposed to different potential environmental issues such as heat, outside elements, dirt, moisture and other contaminants. Seals are an integral part of bearing design, helping protect the bearing from environmental hazards and contaminants. If contaminants do make it past the seal, that could lead to lubrication issues and damage to rolling surfaces, resulting in poor and unsatisfactory performance.
Browning And Sealmaster Set the Standard in Bearing Seals
Regal Rexnord’s Browning and Sealmaster brands have mounted bearings with suitable seal options for any application.
Browning mounted ball bearings have a single lip contact seal with a metal flinger to help fan away potential debris. Browning’s standard seal design is comparably used by other top tier 1 bearing suppliers.
Sealmaster offers felt seals for its standard units as well as other types of heavy-duty seal options. The Sealmaster felt seal design is a 3-component system:
A gauge steel backing pressed inside the outer ring’s land diameter
A gauge steel flinger press-fitted to its inner rings outside diameter
A felt seal material located between the 2-gauge steels.
This unique sealing system traps debris while allowing purged grease at re-lube to expel potential contaminants that might have entered the bearing. Press-fitted seals also provide greater holding power as an important feature, preventing possible dislodging due to grease pressure at re-lube. Unlike seals snapped on to the outer ring groove, care should be taken to limit grease pressure as this could cause seals to be dislodged. In this condition, contaminants could readily enter the bearing, compromising lubrication and eventually leading to possible seizure.
Seal Options for Different Environments
In most applications, a bearing’s useful life depends on how effectively the seals are maintained to seal off contaminants. Exposure to dirty or wet environments requires a more robust or heavier duty type seal. Resolving these issues requires a range of options to meet the demands in the application. Sealmaster offers these options with increasing seal effectiveness, as illustrated below from low drag “X” to heavy duty “HPS” seals.
Sealmaster’s mounted roller bearings use a similar concept to the felt seal design for mounted spherical roller bearings (in the USRB series) and mounted taper roller bearings ( in the RPB series). For wet applications, contact lip seals are used as an option.
Both the USRB and RPB product lines have inner ring mounted seals versus housing mounted seals. This maintains seal pressure regardless of misalignment condition. During misalignment, a housing mounted seal could be pinched on one side while lifting the seal on opposite side. When this happens, the pinched seal may cause increased contact pressure while the raised seal could cause a gap, allowing potential contaminants to enter the bearing.
Regal Rexnord offers a variety of mounted bearing seal features so that you can find the most effective component for your application, while minimizing costs.
Visit the Regal Rexnord bearings page to find a bearing to fit your application.
To find out how Sealmaster and Browning bearing seals can work with your application, schedule time to talk with an expert.
John Mella
John Mella is an application engineer with the Regal Rexnord bearings group. With Regal Rexnord since 2006, John supports inside and outside sales as well as distributors providing technical assistance with unmounted and mounted product lines. His industry knowledge and years of hands-on bearing experience helped provide OEM’s and end-users with application review, troubleshooting, training and inspection reports. He’s been involved in test lab supervision with operation responsibilities and test machine set up in support of new product development.
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