Bearing Steel

High Mechanical Properties: Bearing steel is known for its exceptional strength, hardness, toughness, and wear resistance. It can withstand high stress, heavy loads, and high temperatures without deforming or breaking.

Durability and Longevity: Bearing steel has a high resistance to wear, corrosion, and fatigue, making it ideal for long-term use. Due to its long lifespan, it can withstand intense use without needing frequent replacement, reducing maintenance costs, and downtime.

Versatility and Compatibility: Bearing steel is widely used in various applications, including automotive, aerospace, industrial, and agricultural industries. It is compatible with various lubricants and can work in different operating conditions.

Consistency and Reliability: Bearing steel's consistent and reliable performance has made it an industry standard for high-performance bearings. It can hold tight tolerances, enabling it to create precision parts for critical applications.

Cost-Effective: Bearing steel's exceptional mechanical properties, durability, and longevity make it a cost-effective option in the long run. The longer lifespan means that changes and replacements are less frequent, reducing the overall expenses.

High contact fatigue strength
Contact fatigue damage is the main form of normal bearing damage. When a rolling bearing is running, the rolling elements roll between the raceways of the inner and outer rings of the bearing. The contact parts are subjected to periodic alternating loads, which can reach hundreds of thousands of times per minute. Under the repeated action of periodic alternating stress, the contact surface Fatigue peeling occurs. Once the rolling bearing begins to peel off, it will cause the bearing to vibrate, increase noise, and the operating temperature to rise sharply, causing the bearing to eventually be damaged. This form of damage is called contact fatigue damage. Therefore, the steel for rolling bearings is required to have high contact fatigue strength.

High wear resistance
When rolling bearings work normally, in addition to rolling friction, there is also sliding friction. The main parts where sliding friction occurs are: the contact surface between the rolling element and the raceway, the contact surface between the rolling element and the cage pocket, the cage and the ferrule guide rib, and the roller end surface and the ferrule guide. Wait between the sides. The existence of sliding friction in rolling bearings inevitably causes wear of bearing parts. If the wear resistance of the bearing steel is poor, the rolling bearing will lose precision prematurely due to wear or the rotation accuracy will decrease, resulting in increased vibration and reduced service life of the bearing. Therefore, bearing steel is required to have high wear resistance.

High elastic limit
When the rolling bearing is working, since the contact area between the rolling element and the ring raceway is very small, when the bearing is bearing load, especially when bearing a large load, the contact pressure on the contact surface is very large. In order to prevent excessive plastic deformation from occurring under high contact stress, resulting in loss of bearing accuracy or occurrence of surface cracks, the bearing steel is required to have a high elastic limit.
Four appropriate hardness

Suitable hardness
Hardness is one of the important indicators of rolling bearings. It is closely related to the material contact fatigue strength, wear resistance, and elastic limit, and directly affects the life of the rolling bearing. The hardness of the bearing is usually determined based on the way and size of the load the bearing bears, the overall size of the bearing, and the wall thickness. The hardness of the steel used for rolling bearings must be appropriate. If it is too large or too small, it will affect the service life of the bearing. As we all know, the main failure forms of rolling bearings are contact fatigue damage, and loss of bearing accuracy due to poor wear resistance or dimensional instability; if the bearing parts lack a certain toughness, they will suffer from brittle fracture when subjected to large impact loads. Bearing damage. Therefore, the hardness of the bearing must be determined based on the specific conditions of the bearing and the mode of damage. For bearing accuracy loss due to fatigue spalling or poor wear resistance, bearing parts should be selected with higher hardness; for bearings that bear larger impact loads (such as rolling mill bearings, railway bearings and some automobile bearings, etc.), the hardness should be appropriately reduced. Hardness is necessary to improve the toughness of the bearing.

Good impact toughness
Many rolling bearings will be subject to certain impact loads during use, so the bearing steel is required to have a certain degree of toughness to ensure that the bearings are not damaged by impact. For bearings that bear large impact loads, such as rolling mill bearings and railway bearings, materials are required to have relatively high impact toughness and fracture toughness. Some of these bearings use bainite quenching heat treatment process, and some use carburizing steel materials, just to These bearings are guaranteed to have good impact resistance toughness.

Good dimensional stability
Rolling bearings are precision mechanical parts, and their accuracy is measured in microns. During long-term storage and use, changes in the internal structure or stress will cause changes in the bearing size, causing the bearing to lose accuracy. Therefore, in order to ensure the dimensional accuracy of the bearing, the bearing steel should have good dimensional stability.

Good anti-rust performance
Rolling bearings have many production processes and a long production cycle. Some semi-finished products or finished parts need to be stored for a long time before assembly. Therefore, bearing parts are prone to certain corrosion during the production process or during the storage of finished products, especially It’s in humid air. Therefore, bearing steel is required to have good anti-rust properties.

Good process performance
During the production process of rolling bearings, their parts undergo multiple cold and hot processing processes. This requires that bearing steel should have good process properties, such as cold and hot forming properties, cutting and grinding properties, heat treatment properties, etc., to meet the needs of large-volume, high-efficiency, low-cost and high-quality production of rolling bearings.