Speaking of bearings, this is also a pain in the hearts of Chinese people. I have seen the comparison between Chinese-made and German-made bearings. The Chinese-made bearings stop in a few seconds after a slight rotation. The German-made bearings use the same force. But it can spin for a few minutes. If placed in a vacuum, it can spin forever. This is a huge gap. The main reason for exploring it is still the material.

Recently, Xiwang Special Steel has reported a good news. They have produced the steel needed to manufacture high-end bearings. It may not be long before China can produce bearings that never stop.

Let’s take a look at the performance comparison video between Chinese and German bearings——

The role and difficulties of high-end bearings

As an indispensable core component of mechanical equipment, bearing support The mechanical rotating body reduces its friction coefficient and ensures its rotation accuracy. Whether airplanes, automobiles, high-speed rails, or high-precision machine tools, instruments and meters, all rotating parts need bearings.

It is no exaggeration to say that the bearing in the engine has been working in 'purgatory'-it not only has to run at a speed of tens of thousands of revolutions per minute for a long time, but also endure various forms of stress extrusion , Friction and ultra-high temperature. This puts forward high requirements on the accuracy, performance, life and reliability of the bearing, and the key factors that determine these four points are the material.

Unfortunately, although my country's shaft-making technology is close to the world's top level, the material-that is, high-end bearing steel almost all depends on imports.

Which link is my country’s high-end bearing material stuck?

According to a report from Science and Technology Daily: As a “Top 100 Chinese Enterprises”, a large state-owned steel group in East China has its own high-quality steel base, but it can’t do it. To produce high-end steel for bearings, we can only rely on imports. Not long ago, nearly 100 million yuan was spent on importing steel for bearings.

Generally speaking, in the steel industry, 8 PPM steel is good steel; 5 PPM steel is top steel, which is exactly what high-end bearings require. The research and development, manufacturing and sales of high-end bearing steel are basically monopolized by the world's bearing giants Timken of the United States and SKF of Sweden.

In the past few years, they established bases in Yantai, Shandong and Jinan respectively, purchasing low-end materials from China, using their core technology to make high-end bearings, and selling them to the Chinese market at ten times the price.

Adding rare earths in the steelmaking process can make the original high-quality steel more 'strong'. But how to add, this is the core secret of the world's bearing giants.

Rare earths are called 'industrial vitaminsIn the 1980s, my country set off an upsurge in the development and application of rare earth steels. Scientists generally believe that adding rare earths in the steelmaking process is the technical direction to solve high-end bearing steels. However, after adding rare earths to the steel, the performance of the steel becomes Good times and bad times, it is easy to block the gate in the large-scale production process. Although the technical bottleneck has not been broken through many years of research, this has also caused the application of rare earths in the iron and steel industry to change from hot to cold.

Similar to a drop of ink in the same basin, how much rare earth is appropriate to add to 1 ton of steel? How to add it?

Xiwang Special Steel has a good news

As the first batch of high-end rare earth bearing steel jointly built by Xiwang Special Steel and the Institute of Metals of the Chinese Academy of Sciences rolls off the production line, this problem will be solved.

On July 8, Xiwang Special Steel's first batch of high-end rare earth bearing steel was successfully produced off the assembly line. The technical performance reached the international advanced level, and the product quality exceeded the relevant standards of the United States and Europe. The high-end rare earth bearing steel produced by Xiwang Special Steel and the Institute of Metals of the Chinese Academy of Sciences can be said to have solved the 'stuck neck' problem of high-end bearing steel technology.

Through more than 10 years of technical research, the Institute of Metals of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has mastered this core technology-the new technology of rare earth steelmaking, which has broken through the technical bottleneck of the industrial application of rare earths in steel. In order to realize the industrialization of high-end bearing steel, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Xiwang Special Steel jointly formed an industrialization research team to jointly build a pilot and industrialization base for high-end localized rare earth bearing steel.

On June 6, Xiwang Special Steel and the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly held a high-end localized rare earth bearing steel industrialization kick-off meeting to make specific arrangements for the promotion of high-end localized rare earth bearing steel industrialization: the Chinese Academy of Sciences is responsible for smelting technology and mold Many doctors in casting technology, continuous casting technology, heat treatment technology, thermal simulation technology, etc. have stationed in Xiwang Special Steel to carry out their work. Xiwang Special Steel has established a leading group for promotion and a special bearing steel research room in the technical center to quickly undertake And transform the high-end localized rare earth bearing steel innovation technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In just one month, the first batch of high-end rare earth bearing steels was successfully produced off the assembly line.

During this period, Xiwang Special Steel and the Institute of Metals of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the high-end downstream high-end customers of rare earth bearing steel localization also held a rare earth bearing steel localization cooperation promotion meeting at Xiwang Special Steel, confirming the research and development of the localization of rare earth bearing steel Direction, and established a supply-demand partnership to jointly carry out the construction of high-end localized rare earth bearing steel production lines.

At present, the first batch of high-end domestically produced rare earth bearing steels to be rolled off the assembly line fully meets the quality requirements of high-end customers and has been supplied in accordance with the technical agreement.

Using this batch of steel to produce bearings, then the non-stop bearing produced in our country is just around the corner, let us look forward to it.