What are the types of thrust bearings?

Thrust bearing is a special sliding bearing, which is a double row cylindrical roller bearing composed of a pair of mutually meshing bearing parts. Thrust bearings have a simple structure and do not require lubrication or sealing to prevent contamination and corrosion. They are suitable for applications that bear large shaft loads but do not rotate at high speeds. Thrust bearings are divided into thrust ball bearings and thrust roller bearings.

Thrust ball bearing

Thrust ball bearings mainly consist of a bearing seat and a set of spherical rollers. The inner ring has two spherical rolling elements, which are installed on both sides of the bearing seat. The rollers are connected to the raceway on the other end through the inner ring. The bearing seat is one of two cylindrical holes bolted to the base, with a rotatable bolt mounted on it. The cylindrical hole is cylindrical and has a certain distance between the two spherical rolling elements. It is the largest gap between the bearing seat and the spherical rolling elements. Spherical rollers are composed of a raceway with threads or gears connected to the spherical rolling element and in contact with the other end surface. Corresponding to the inner ring, the roller tooth shape is a semi-conical boss (or "concave spherical") ) instead of a truncated cone (or “convex spherical”).

Thrust roller bearing

Thrust roller bearings are designed to meet the requirements of heavy and high loads. They have the characteristics of light weight, large load-bearing capacity, small friction factor, and wide temperature change range. Under heavy load, low speed or light load, the radial load can be maintained without axial movement, and it can withstand large axial loads. Thrust bearings are widely used in various machinery such as machine tool spindles, internal combustion engine blocks, ships, and automobile engines. In modern machine tools, the application of thrust bearings is quite common - usually multiple thrust bearings with two or three rollers can be used in machining centers, etc.