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Milking the benefits with value-added Bearings from ERIKS & NSK
Enduring repeated bearing failures on your critical assets will have a significant impact on your productivity as well as increasing the stress on your maintenance teams to get production up and running quickly.
Recent research has shown that during breakdown periods your team are 9x more likely to have an accident than when undertaking scheduled maintenance. So when a UK based milk processing plant called in ERIKS and NSK, there was more than just downtime disruptions on their mind.
Frequent bearing failures on one of its principle conveyors was becoming increasingly problematic, the inaccessible positioning resulted in the inability to provide regular re-lubrication. As a result of this frustrating occurrence, the customer was required to change the bearings every 16 weeks across 5 conveyors at the expense of five hours downtime each time. As you can imagine, this was proving rather costly, from increased maintenance time and lost production.
Following an application review undertaken as part of NSK's AIP Value-Added Programme, the study discovered water ingress was the issue and causing bearing corrosion frequently. As a result, NSK recommended the use of NSK Stainless Steel Silver-Lube bearings to eliminate the problem.
The Cream of the Crop
Silver-Lube® units consist of bearing inserts with high-grade stainless steel rings and balls, cage, flingers and set screws, Silver-Lube® units are further enhanced with durable, heat-resistant nitrile rubber seals. These innovative bearing units also factory filled with a wide temperature USDA H1 food grade grease as standard, which helped prevent the ingress of contaminants.
These inserts are located within a high-strength PBT thermoplastic housing, featuring a stainless steel grease nipple and bolt-hole liners, purposely moulded into the housing to achieve optimum hygiene in washdown conditions.
They are available in a variety of configurations – pillow block, two-bolt flange, four-bolt flange and take-up – Silver-Lube® units are capable of accommodating initial misalignment from mounting errors. This capability makes these bearings ideal for use in food and beverage plant machinery such as shakers, fillers, centrifugal separators, bottling machines and conveyors.
Cashing In on Reliability and Safety
A trial was proposed and implemented on all five conveyor systems. This resulted in a reduction in machine downtime, maintenance costs and significant annual cost saving as bearing service life was extended to more than 5 years. This simple switch resulted in savings of £6,540 pa culminating in £32,700 across five-years trouble-free operation, not to mention improving site safety, after all less haste means more speed and safety.
For more information on Bearing & Lubrication solutions and to get in touch with one of our ERIKS Bearings Specialists or Lubrication Engineers, please contact your local ERIKS Service Centre, who will be happy to discuss your options.
#NSK #Dairy #milk #Bearings #ERIKS #LetsMakeIndustryWorkBetter #Engineering
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