A practical illustration showing the savings which might be achieved emanates from Stora Enso, a paperboard producer in Sweden. With sealed SKF bearings at ericbearings.com, Stora Enso has grown uptime, eliminated its lubrication system and reduced water reclamation costs.Previously, the organization was experiencing continuous bearing failures in the suction box vacuum system employed to extract water from pulp. After just four to seven months of operation, the bearings were failing, as water leaked into your bearing arrangement, washing grease out, that led to fretting corrosion and lastly to premature bearing failure. Grease in water had to be extracted and dumped, preparing water treatment costs.

Using GBLM, SKF engineers are already able to determine the real-world benefits hybrid bearings may have. In the case of a poorly lubricated pump bearing, as an illustration, the rating life of a hybrid bearing may be up to eight times what steel equivalent. For a screw compressor bearing running with contaminated lubricant, meanwhile, the hybrid provides a rating lifetime hundred times over a conventional steel bearing.

"SKF has become at the forefront of developing new strategies to calculating bearing life", says Guillermo Morales-Espejel, Principal Scientist at SKF Research and Technology Development. "GBLM is a giant leap for bearing science and may enable better choices to be produced when selecting bearings to get a wide variety of applications."

As well to more intuitive, because of a newly developed interface, the modern version of SKF Bearing Select allows the person to quickly run and performs calculations “on-the-fly.” Results are displayed while input parameters are still being entered, and presented automatically inside a clear report, such as up-to-date graphics with the relevant bearing. Having the relevant input data in position, you will surely have the automated report within a minute.

The new edition of SKF Bearing Select gives users a quick, easy, and accurate, evaluation tool for bearing performance. Since the  new software programs are built using a scalable and modular platform, users should expect extra functionality in the future, including having access to SKF’s latest advances in bearing technology, and much more evaluation models.