Overview
NTN-SNR is a major supplier for the helicopter gearbox bearings and more generally for the European market. NTN-SNR has developed a related knowhow in calculation, design, manufacturing to assist all its customers. This explains NTN-SNR’s strong will to answer to this topic.
The NTN-SNR objectives for this project are to develop, design, manufacture, test and simulate the new generation of tapered bearings for aerospace applications and especially for the helicopter gearbox bearings. For NTN-SNR, hybrid bearing is a promising solution for aerospace market especially thanks to the weight saving and the potential improvement of the bearing life duration it offers. The objective of NTN-SNR proposal is to meet the topic leader requirements.
To do so, the hybrid bearing prototypes will be designed, calculated, manufactured, and tested to compare steel and hybrid bearing behaviour and to demonstrate the benefits.
For test activity, the objective is to perform the back-to-back assessment under several test conditions (clean environment, contaminated conditions, poor lubrication conditions, oil shut off conditions and tests with defect on rollers) in order to demonstrate the benefits offered by hybrid tapered roller bearings.
In order to start aerospace mass production of hybrid tapered roller bearings, the critical defects (size, shape, location on the rolling element) have to be defined. Hence one of NTN-SNR’s objective is to determine the size of critical defect on tapered roller bearing performance.
This activity will be based on NTN-SNR knowledge on hybrid bearings with the complement of dedicated tests that will be performed in the scope of this project.
The last objective is to simulate the hybrid bearing behaviour in order to update NTN-SNR’s handbook and design rules to guarantee the quality, the robustness and the optimization of our bearing designs.
The means implemented to meet these objectives are described in the part B (§3)