Bearing Tester

Anderon Meters For The Production of High-Quality Bearings

The quality and characteristics required of bearings continue to advance and diversify. One especially significant concern in today’s market is the reduction of bearing vibrations and noise. SUGAWARA’s Anderon meters are practical vibration and noise testers for ball-and-roller bearings, which are now essential tools in achieving high-speed operations for microcomputer hard disk drives and quiet operations for home appliances such as air conditioners.

Anderon Meter

An anderon meter measures the anderon value in an assembled bearing. In all bearings, a certain degree of displacement occurs between the outer and inner races during rotation. Ideally, the bearing components – balls, outer race, and inner race – should be perfectly smooth and round. In practice, they have slight surface irregularities arising from machining imperfections and other factors. Due to these irregularities, when the outer race of a bearing is stationary and the inner race rotates, rolling surface irregularities combine to produce a displacement in a radial direction. This causes the outer race to displace from the inner race. The extent and speed of the radial displacement of the outer race resulting from the rotation of the inner race determine the degree of vibration and noise in the bearing. Generally speaking, less and slower displacement of the outer race caused by the rotation of the inner race means lower vibration and noise in the bearing, resulting in higher bearing performance. The “anderon” value, numerical expression of this characteristic, allows quantitative assessment of bearing performance. Analysis of the anderon value enables not only the discovery of what causes vibrations (scratches on the raceways of outer and inner races made during machining, scratches on ball surfaces, contamination by dust particles, etc.) but also the sorting of bearings by precision class and more accurate assessment of bearing quality.

System configuration
The anderon meter mainly consists of three components: the indication unit, the drive unit, and the converter.

Indication Unit ADA-15
The ADA-15 Indication Unit is a readout for the anderon value. Measured values are divided into three bands, that is, L band, M band, and H band, and processed and displayed as “Anderon” values of each band. The readout value range can be selected from the 1/10/100 Anderon range. The electrical noise is less than 0.1 Anderon at 1 Anderon range.

Converter ADS-12
The ADS-12 Converter is a velocity sensor that converts mechanical vibration into electrical signals, which are in proportion to vibration velocity.

ADM-100 series
The ADM-100 series Drive Unit is for rotating ball bearing of smaller sizes. As in Fig. 3, it rotates the inner ring of a ball bearing fit into the arbor which in turn is inserted in the spindle at the speed of 1800r/min.