The Unique Story of Schaeffler’s Needle Roller Bearing Design

Dr.-Ing. E.h. Georg Schaeffler filed a patent for a component known as the cage-guided needle roller bearing (NRB) in 1950. A component offering a simple design, robust operation, and a very small design envelope that helped put Schaeffler on the map in the automotive and industrial markets. The company’s application expertise—from manual to automatic transmissions, followed later by e-mobility—evolved along with its NRB bearing technology.

The lightest and smallest option in the roller bearing family is the NRB, according to Victoria Bigham, NRB product line manager at Schaeffler. They provide instant advantages for bearing applications that require reduced weight and space. A needle roller is defined as two end faces and a lateral surface with a length approximately 3–11 times larger than diameter.

“As we look at different bearing applications, everything, in my mind, is just a fancy NRB,” Bigham said.“When you get into ball bearings, cylindricals, tapers, you’re using that same roller cage/raceway combination in theory. So, our job is to go after a variety of different applications to determine how we can best use our bearing expertise to enhance these components for our customers.”

In 1950, Dr. Schaeffler filed a patent application for the caged NRB, shortly after founding the company, then

known as Industrie GmbH, in 1946. The first practical tests involving cageguided needle roller bearings began in February 1950. The results were convincing—the components exhibited extremely low wear and friction. The application for a patent in September 1950 laid the foundation for the product's success. In February 1951, just one year after construction of the first prototype, the first volume production orders were obtained from automotive manufacturers. Industrial applications soon followed. 

“Schaeffler was the first to offer
the separation between the rollers
for large-scale production volumes,”
Bigham added. “As the automotive
industry was taking off, you were able
to get the speed that you couldn’t get
beforehand with a full complement
roller bearing. The rise of the caged
NRB essentially went together with the
rise of the automotive industry.”

 With his invention, Dr. Schaeffler
eliminated the serious disadvantages
associated with the full-complement
needle roller bearings that had previously been used as standard: The
long needle rollers tended to move
in a transverse direction during rotation of the bearing (skewing), which
would then cause the bearing to jam.
Furthermore, a substantial amount of
sliding friction was generated between
the counter-rotating needle rollers. 

Schaeffler’s development of the new
needle cage overcame these disadvantages and permitted considerably
higher speeds and less friction. This
allowed engineers to substitute other
bearing designs for cage-guided NRBs
and significantly improve the performance of their applications. The use of
needle roller bearings in mechanical
and plant engineering, construction,
and agricultural machinery, and in
conveyor technology, was also being
gradually introduced.