Wear-resistant bearings for wind-energy applications are designed to reduce life-limiting wear problems including micropitting on main shaft spherical roller bearings and micropitting, smearing and brittle flaking on wind turbine gearbox bearings. Wear-resistant bearings also provide up to 3.5 times greater L10 life for main-shaft and gearbox bearings.

Design Attributes

• In-house developed wear-resistant coating and bearing materials help defeat the adhesive wear mechanisms that cause smearing, micropitting and fretting
• The unique coating forms barriers to adhesive wear during brief periods of lube starvation
• Specially-designed rollers remove shoulders around debris craters on raceways and reduce surface roughness on the ring raceways
• Rollers polish ring raceways which reduces Ra (surface finish), increases Λ (lambda), reduces rolling torque and increases efficiency

Applications

• Wind turbine main-shaft and gearbox bearings

Timken Wear-Resistant Bearings: Longer Bearing Life
Extensive laboratory testing shows that wear-resistant tapered roller bearings outperform standard tapered roller bearings.

Debris Tolerance Testing
In debris-laden environments, Timken testing shows that wear resistant tapered roller bearings have 60% longer life than standard tapered roller bearings.