Spherical roller bearings are double row units comprising solid outer rings with a concave raceway, solid inner rings and barrel rollers with cages. The symmetrical barrel rollers orient themselves freely on the concave outer ring raceway. As a result, shaft flexing and misalignment of the bearing seats are compensated. In split spherical roller bearings, the inner ring, outer ring and cage with the roller set are split in half. The split bearing rings are held together by screws.

Split spherical roller bearings can generally be mounted instead of unsplit spherical roller bearings with adapter sleeves. The preconditions for replacement are that the outside diameter, outer ring width and diameter of the shaft seat are identical and that the bearings are suitable for the load case. Furthermore, the common application for split spherical roller bearings is on shafts supported at several points and difficult to access mounting locations.

Due to the screw connection in the outer ring, the pitch circle for the rolling element set is smaller than that of an unsplit spherical roller bearing. As a result, the load carrying capacity of split spherical roller bearings is lower by comparison. Since they contain the maximum number of rollers with the largest possible dimensions, they can nevertheless achieve a high load carrying capacity.

Application

Typical areas of application include conveying equipment, mining industry, materials processing plant, belt drives, crankshafts, ventilation plant, rolling mills, ships and paper machinery.