NA Poly-Round® bearings deliver substantial savings by reducing cost of lubricant, labor time, and downtime associated with failures of rolling element bearings in extreme environments. NA Poly-Round® bearings are USDA-accepted and lubricant-free Class 3 plane bearings. They can operate at temperatures up to 200ºF, loads up to 2,000 PSI and speeds up to 1000 RPM on a 1 inch shaft. In specific kinds of applications, EDT guarantees its NA Poly-Round® bearings to last at least one year even in submerged and washdown environments; 18 to 24 month life is not unusual. NA Poly-Round® bearings do not fail catastrophically, allowing the convenience of planned maintenance cycles. Conventional rolling element bearings operating in wet environments may need lubrication one to three times per day, and bearings in food contact locations often require expensive food-grade grease. An additional factor is the labor to re-grease bearings. There are also the costs of tracking consumption and disposing of the grease through a plant's effluent system. The biggest problem with rolling element bearings, however, is that they often fail catastrophically. The shaft may be destroyed and other machine parts may be damaged, requiring replacement along with the bearing. The balls and grease are often ejected from the bearing, contaminating the product and incurring additional costs, ruined product and production shutdown. For any and all of these reasons, the cost to operate food processing lines is typically estimated to be between $300 and $1,000 per minute. EDT NA Poly-Round® bearings avoid all of these problems by providing a plane bearing surface that eliminates the need for lubrication and does not fail catastrophically. The available bearing surface of an NA Poly-Round® is observable so the amount of wear can be determined with a visual inspection. When the bearings eventually wear out, they do not damage the shaft or contaminate the environment. The maintenance staff simply replaces the insert and the machine is back up and running for another life cycle of 12-plus months.Typical applications for EDT NA Poly-Round® bearings include sprocket-driven conveyor belts, processing equipment, dumpers, and packaging equipment used in meat and poultry processing, bakeries, smokehouse, and freezer feed conveyors. Although NA Poly-Round® bearings cannot be used inside ovens, they can be used on conveyors feeding into and out of ovens, cooling conveyors and freezer feed conveyors. For applications beyond of the range of the NA material, EDT Corp has other high performance polymer bearings materials available. Unfortunately, Poly-Round® bearings, like most plane bearings, are not suitable for applications with high tension (such as flat conveyor belts), applications with overhung loads, high speed devices (such as fans and pumps), trunnions (due to the unpredictable and varying loads), and tabletop beverage chain. With these few exceptions, EDT NA Poly-Round® bearings will pay big dividends in most processing applications.
