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A global organization, Meter Bearings comprises offices and production centers in China, Germany, and the United States, with their headquarters in Italy. Their Italian office, Meter S.p.A., is the center of product development, and is involved in all aspects of their work: sales, production and logistics.
Meter Bearings take pride in their international presence, their ISO certified quality, their personalized and flexible product line, and their expert people. For over 30 years, they have maintained a strong focus in designing and producing roller and ball bearings that tolerate both heat and extreme stress, drawing from the experience and creative talent of their team.
Firm believers in the uniqueness of tailored products, they create custom bearings free from the restrictions of catalogs. Their product line includes: ball bearings, roller bearings, treatments and metalworking, and special products (e.g. seal rings and sliding bushes).
Meter S.p.A. utilizes several software tools within their development process, including RomaxDesigner. Xane Plascencia, engineering department at Meter S.p.A, commented, “We use the latest software tools to determine a bearing’s geometric characteristics, required thermal treatment, and appropriate lubricants for individual applications.”
Romax have worked with Meter S.p.A. for several years to ensure optimum bearing performance and help prevent unwanted issues. Plascencia said, “We chose Romax as our consultancy partner for several reasons. Firstly, we needed a complete analysis including static and life rating calculations, with iterative calculations at each parameter variation. Secondly, we knew that RomaxDesigner could simulate the most realistic loading conditions, including crucial shaft deflections and subsequent load distribution at the rollers. Finally, it was important that we could present our customer with good quality reporting and graphics, and we knew that Romax could provide that."
When considering bearing applications, tribology analysis is very important according to Plascencia. "The operative conditions have a great impact on the bearing performance, which RomaxDesigner is able to evaluate. In this way, under certain conditions such as mixed lubrication regime, RomaxDesigner helps us to focus on the best solution according to that particular application," Plascencia said.
Following successful completion of a Romax consultancy project, Meter S.p.A. invested in RomaxDesigner. “The consultancy service showed us that the software was suitable for optimizing bearing internal geometry. RomaxDesigner allows us to design completely customized bearings because: we can consider the whole system, including shaft/housing deflections, misalignments etc.; we can optimize the internal bearing geometry and analyze the effect of varying particular parameters on the rating life and contact stress; and we can create very good quality reports, which help us to either support or disregard design options," Plascencia said.
Romax helped Meter S.p.A us to create custom reports, which means that they can quickly and easily output results from different models in consistent templates, to supply customers with the information they want to see. They have also used batch running for several projects now. Batch running allows the running of RomaxDesigner to be automated either through the command line, or through an external program (for example Isight, Optimus, Comet, modeFRONTIER, or programs like Microsoft Excel).
Plascencia continued: “Batch running makes our response to clients faster as it replaces manual operations with automatic running. This also reduces the probability of introducing errors. We’ve started to implement this for all analyses where we require many runs, as it can considerably reduce calculation time – offering us an incredibly important time saving in the development phase of a new product. RomaxDesigner Enterprise allows us to meet the needs of our customers quickly, effectively, and professionally.”
Meter S.p.A. has several projects planned in the near future which will use Romax software including developing a customized bearing for a heavy duty application, determining the optimal preload conditions for a tapered roller bearing under all its various loading conditions, and, as a general rule applicable to all of their projects, to select the optimum bearing design according to the theoretical calculation results provided by Romax software.
“One of the advantages to using RomaxDesigner is that Romax is always developing new and useful features. The new roller edge stress feature in R17 is a very important development for us, as we can now more accurately account for the impact of stress and material yield on bearing life," said Plascencia. "These improvements to the bearing analysis features all contribute to us being able to provide our customers with the most accurate results possible.”