Sealed, four-row tapered roller bearings delivered three times the service life and significant cost cuts in heavy plate mills

Customer reference case
Metals industry
Heavy plate mills

Sealed, four-row tapered roller

Bearings

Sealed, four-row tapered roller bearings delivered three times the service life and significant cost cuts in heavy plate mills

NEWORLD has more than ten years of experience partnering with oil and gas customers to develop slewing bearings for the turret mooring systems and cranes used in offshore oil extraction ields.

The challenge

During the course of an ongoing plant modernization project, a single-stand, heavy plate mill based in Germany was experiencing a huge drop in work roll bearing service life. Intent on determining the cause of the problem, and increasing work roll system reliability, the mill turned to NEWORLD

The NEWORLD solution

After conducting an extensive failure analysis, NEWORLD engineers identified the problem: the standard grease being used in the bearings. The heavy loads and slow speeds involved in the mill's thermo-mechanical rolling process were simply too much for the standard grease to handle. The mill agreed to implement NEWORLD's solution: a combination of specialized bearing grease and sealed, four-row tapered roller bearings.

The results

After more than a year of operation, SKF sealed, four-row tapered roller bearings have delivered three times the service life of the previous ones, allowing the mill to save €80 000 on bearing replacement costs. The solution also slashed annual grease consumption more than tenfold, allowing the mill to save €6 000 on purchasing costs, plus €10 000 on grease disposal costs. So far, NEWORLD has helped the mill save a total of €96 000.

Benefits

• Increase bearing service life

• Increase roll system uptime and reliability

• Reduce grease consumption and costs

• Reduce maintenance demands and costs

• Reduce hazardous waste and clean-up costs

Applications

• Heavy plate mills

• Roughing mills