Types of bearings

There are two main bearing families:

Ball bearings

theoretically, ball – raceway contact is limited to occasional.

Ball bearings are the most widely used in industry because they feature the best performance / price ratio.

They are found in wheels, car transmissions, farming machinery, machine tool spindles, etc.

If the gap clearance is increased, angular contact is obtained; the bearing can now bear increased axial loads* and performance levels are enhanced.

Roller bearings

roller – raceway contact is theoretically linear.

Furthermore, there are several different types of rollers:

cylindrical
Cylindrical roller bearings are used in car gearboxes, on bearing block 4 of the Boeing and Airbus CFM56 engine, in the rail sector.

The cylindrical bearing is almost always used with a ball bearing to support axial loads*.

taper
The advantage of the taper roller bearing is that it can withstand combined loads*, while it has a very small outside dimension footprint. It is notably used in car wheels, train sparkplugs etc.
However, the drawback is that it is difficult to manufacture and is therefore more expensive.

spherical
Contact pressure between rolling bodies and raceway is distributed along a line in roller bearings. In ball bearings, it is concentrated on a single point. It is for this reason that, for comparable outside dimension footprint, roller bearings withstand higher loads* and lower limit speeds.

*Axial, radial and combined loads

Puce bleu A load is a force applied to the bearing.

Choice of bearing (according to load and speed)