Our current solution is a sealed grease bearing. It does have ports for grease refill/purge on maintenance intervals.
There's an outfit called Champion Bearings that can provide large diameter, full ceramic bearings. You're right though, only way to know for sure is to test! Since we have a...
To get to hydrodynamic surface speeds we would need a prohibitive diameter, IE going from 8" to something like 20" diameter. We did have some buy-in from the ceramic guys but they seem to have very limited experience as compared to other types of water lubricated bearings, like cutlass or...
Yes, I was thinking that keeping the ceramic bearing in a housing and using a mechanical seal would do well. Pre-filling the housing with freshwater or biodegradable oil would greatly reduce water ingress over time. Hoping for something like 3 years service interval.
Hi guys,
First time poster after reading the forums for years!
We have an interesting project that requires a seawater submerged rotating assembly. We need bearings, and plain bearings have too much drag loss for us. Long service intervals would be ideal so we're hesitant with using seals in...
