Tribology Systems, Inc. (TSI) learned recently from a customer that their standard spherical plain bearings used in high-speed vehicles are wearing excessively and sometimes seizing in service, when they are not periodically re-greased, which raised safety issues.  Their wear life has been reduced, especially in new high-speed passenger-vehicle applications.

TSI engineers previously have used advanced lubrication and bearing dynamics technology to design improved spherical plain bearings similar to those in the current application.  Extensive lab testing of this new design bearing demonstrated many times the seizure resistance and wear life of standard bearings.

In one case, our special designed spherical plain bearings have been in service successfully for over twenty years in twenty utilities world-wide, in an application where no standard bearing would work for our customer before coming to us.  A lab test machine was developed that simulated the operating conditions of a spherical plain link bearing similar to the current application, and reproduced the field failures that had occurred.

An improved design of this bearing was developed, based on extensive advanced lubrication analyses, with the test results demonstrating seizure-free operation at many times higher load and speed than in the application.  Long-term endurance tests were then run with the improved design bearing, resulting in a projected wear life in service of over twenty years.