Sealed ball bearings highly differ from the open and shielded ball bearing in that you cannot re-lubricate them after the lubrication has leaked or broken out. Visit www.ttv-gmbh.de/dichtungstechnik for more on seal ball bearings. Even though this leads to a shorter lifespan as compared with properly maintained open or shielded bearings, when used in the right way, sealed bearings have several benefits over the other types of ball bearings.

Benefits

No maintenance

To properly maintain unsealed ball bearings, you must lubricate them at regular intervals. The lubrication is important in preventing failure. But on the other hand, sealed bearings do not require regular lubrication. The manufacturer does the lubrication and the user shouldn’t lubricate them at any other time.

Regardless of where you are applying the bearings, this feature will save labor but they are more suitable when the bearing is situated in the parts which are inaccessible. The unsealed bearings situated in the hard to reach areas will require you to partially disassemble the surrounding components to do the maintenance.

No contaminants

Contaminants increase chances of wear and tear in addition to reducing the lifespan of the machine parts. The routes in the unsealed bearings which allow for addition of a lubricant also allow the entry of contaminants.

Sealed bearings have no entrances for contaminants because the seal is usually intact – the seal which keeps the lubricant inside also prevents the entry of contaminants. However, the failure of this seal can also result in the bearing’s failure.

No chances of over-lubrication

With sealed bearings you shouldn’t expect any accidental over-lubrication. On the other hand the unsealed bearings fail quite often due to over-lubrication as compared with under-lubrication.

To highly benefit from sealed bearings, you should never install grease fitting on them or try to force grease into them. Marking your machine properly will ensure that the technicians working on it won’t try to lubricate the sealed bearings.

Contact and non-contact

The contact seals bearings touch the inner track or the inner race on which ball bearings spin. This helps in preventing moisture entry but also results in faster wear and tear and higher levels of operating temperatures.

But again, the non-contact bearings seals don’t touch the inner races. As a result their running temperature is usually lower and with lower friction but do not exclude moisture effectively from the bearing.

The popularity of sealed bearings has highly grown due to their high usage in some items like cars, power tools and white goods. The seals are important in stopping grease lubrication used in the bearings from leaking out.…