Product name: Si3N4 ceramic bearing balls
Place of Origin: Shanghai, China (Mainland)
Brand Name: OEM
Model Number: Any
Material: Ceramic
Color: Black
Density: 3.20g/cm3
Grade: G3,G5,G10
Main Market: North American, Europe, Asia .
Packaging & Delivery
Packaging Details: Standard package or by customer request1.High temperature resistant
2.Corrosion resistant
3.Longer lasting
4.ISO9001 certificate
5.Plenty of stock
Si3N4 is considered as a suitable material for high speed hybrid bearing in ultra high-speed precision spindles of machine tools or in jet turbines of aircraft due to its desirable properties such as lower density, higher hardness, higher elastic modulus, excellent thermal and chemical stability compared to the traditional bearing steel, and higher fracture toughness than the other advanced ceramics so that the hybrid ceramic bearing with Si3N4 as bearing balls has outstanding advantages of a longer bearing service life (2-5 times of steel bearing), higher running speed (up to 5 x 106 DN), favorable failure mode (failure of Si3N4 is generally by spalling like steel ball due to its higher toughness rather than by catastrophic failure like the other lower toughness ceramics), higher overall accuracy and quality,higher heat resistance, and non-magnetic property etc. Silicon nitride has seen wide usage in the bearing industry in the last 10 years.
Now the difficulty and the price of ceramic ball bearings all depend on the production technology of ceramic balls. Outside, the ceramic ball bearings have been researched since 1960s-1970s. In this period, the main producer of hot-pressed Si3N4 bland ball (marked NC-132) is Norton The hot-press technology is restricted into the producing disk-like Si3N4 blank balls, and the blank balls must be cut to square shape using diamond saw blade, then grinded to near spherical polyhedron, and then processed to G16 ceramic balls by rough grinding, fine grinding and finishing. Si3N4 is superhard and wear-resistant, so it can only be cut and grinded by a few grinding materials such as diamond etc. It can be imagined that the cost of producing Si3N4 balls from hot-pressed Si3N4is so high that it can not be accepted in many applications.
In 1980s, gas pressure sintering (GPS) and hot isostatic pressing(HIP) have been successfully applied in the producing of ceramics. Si3N4 biscuit is molded to spherical shape before sintering, this can overcome a series of shortcomings of hot-pressed Si3N4, the cost falls down a lot, ceramic ball bearings have been widely used in the electrical main arbor, and the application expands gradually to high-speed and high-precision fields such as the main arbor of machine tool and dental drill etc. However, the ceramic ball blank is not completely spherical shape, normally near spherical shape with an annulus or similar sphere with a flat head, the processing cost is still high.