Human movement depends on joints, but what does the movement of machines depend on? This is about the key component of the country's major technical equipment - bearings. On high-speed rail, bearings bear huge loads, and assist trains to run safely, smoothly, and at high speeds under high temperature, corrosion, and wear conditions; in rocket and aircraft engines, bearings help turbopumps rotate under extreme conditions. With the beating of the "steel heart", it will boost the development of aerospace power.
Simply put, as long as the machine is rotating, bearings are used. However, such an important core component is often not understood by people because it works in an "invisible" place. In Luoyang, Henan Province, one of the five largest bearing production bases in my country, there is such a company that focuses on the "one meter wide" in the field of high-end machine tools and industrial automation, and works hard on "1000 meters deep". The turntable bearings and Special bearings for robot reducers occupy 80% and 90% of the domestic market share respectively. Specialized and special innovation, gazelle enterprise, smart factory, single champion... many honors and reputation in the industry, but few traces on the Internet, so it can be called an "invisible champion".
Make the "joints" of industrial robots more precise and durable
Lu Ruifang: This is a six-axis industrial robot, just like a human arm, which has 3 joints, and it has 6 "joints"...
When the reporter walked into the Hongyuan Bearing Drilling Workshop located in the airport industrial cluster area of Luoyang City, Henan Province,
three sets of special bearing production lines for robot reducers came into view. On each production line, there is an industrial robot "sitting in the center".
Under the automatic control of the program, it grabs the bearing components to be processed and accurately puts them into the three CNC machine tools surrounding them for drilling operations.
According to Lu Ruifang, head of the company's technology research and development department, the secret of the flexible operation of these industrial robots lies in their "joints".
Lv Ruifang: Harmonic reducers are used in the "joints" of industrial robots. Without it, the robot cannot move; it can drive large-scale robot movements with a relatively small power to grab heavier objects ;
Just like a bicycle, you can go a long way with a high-speed gear on. And this deceleration is equivalent to decomposing the speed of the high-speed motor to control the movement with higher precision
under a small movement range. The precision of robots used in medical surgery is very high. Our bearings can make the harmonic reducer more accurate and durable.
Pick up the special bearing for harmonic reducer that has been processed. Under the finely polished and metallic luster, the bearing is divided into inner and outer circles.
If you turn it by hand, you can feel both smooth and full of damping. In an instant, the industrial robot has completed a series of actions of picking, clamping, and placing with its help,
saving half of the manpower and allowing the entire workshop to process 500 bearings every day. Lu Ruifang said that the special bearings for robot reducers produced by the company
have occupied 90% of the domestic market, and many technical and technological levels are domestically leading; however, the goal of replacing imports has been achieved on the basis of thousands of trials and errors.
Lu Ruifang: The foreign ones can run for three years without any problem, but in the early stage, ours took less than one year, and the accuracy is no longer as high as others. Since 2011,
after thousands of trials and errors, including the optimization of the process and the introduction of imported testing equipment, it took about seven or eight years before it was truly consistent
with foreign bearings and could completely replace them. Foreign bearings. At present, basically all domestic manufacturers of harmonic reducers have cooperated with us.
Let the CNC machine tool "dance on the hair"
Machine tools are machines that manufacture machines, and are called "industrial mother machines". In addition to the special bearings for reducers used in industrial robots,
enterprises have also made great achievements in the manufacture of turntable bearings used in CNC machine tools. Eighty percent of the domestic market share.
In the company's 30,000-square-meter CNC processing workshop, high-precision CNC machine tools are running non-stop. After turning, milling, planing, grinding, drilling, heat treatment and other processes, neat, brand-new and shiny precision bearings are "lined up" one by one. Step off the conveyor belt. Lu Ruifang said that the core components of high-speed rail, aircraft, and even major technical equipment in the aerospace field are all born on these CNC machine tools. The turntable bearings produced by the company can make the rotation accuracy of CNC machine tools reach 1/30 of a human hair.
Lu Ruifang: CNC machine tools have very high requirements for precision. There is an operation table on it, and the processing of core parts is completed on the operation table. The two ends of the operation table are equipped with CNC turntables, and the inside of the turntable is The precision of the turntable bearing directly affects the precision of the CNC machine tool. The rotation accuracy of the turntable bearings we produce can reach 1/30 of that of a hair, which enables the parts we process to achieve very high precision when drilling.
With the continuous development of the high-end manufacturing industry, the industry has higher and higher requirements for the precision of the "industrial mother machine" - the machine tool;
and the core component - the turntable bearing has been "no standard to follow" in China. To this end, the company established the Henan Province Precision Rotary
Table Bearing Engineering Technology Research Center; two years ago, it began to apply for leading the formulation of the industry standard for rotary table bearings, so that "Made in China" can reach a higher level.
Lv Ruifang: The code name, basic structure, size, technical requirements and testing methods of bearings all need to be standardized. Why set up this industry standard? If there is such a standard, customers can directly
select the model at a glance, and know what kind of interface is involved. Setting the market access threshold for products, standardizing industry production, improving the manufacturing level of turntable bearings,
and facilitating user selection and acceptance are the significance of formulating this industry standard.
Focus on "one meter wide" and strive to be "thousand meters deep"
In addition to the ingenious creation of "historical products", the company is also making a fuss about the intensification and digitization of the production process, which not only makes the production line "do not
go back and forth" from raw materials to assembly, but also becomes the only intelligent factory in the bearing industry in Henan Province. Compared with the beginning of its establishment in 2005, the production
efficiency of conventional products has increased by 31.4%, and the defective rate of products has been reduced by more than half; compared with the full-scale production workshop, the after-sales area is "deserted",
and various product problems that only 7 people can deal with before , now one person can "settle it out". In addition, the solar panels covering the entire plant can generate 3 million kilowatt-hours of electricity each year,
making the company basically self-sufficient in electricity consumption for production.
After overcoming one difficulty after another, where the next "kilometer" will go has become a question that enterprises are thinking about. They found that as the artificial intelligence and service robot markets gradually heat up, humanoid robots seem to be the next-generation robot products that are most likely to make the public feel friendly. What kind of "joints" do humanoid robots need? Lu Ruifang said that related research and development is already on the way.
Lu Ruifang: Because our current bearings are mainly used in industrial robots, our future development direction is in humanoid robots; each "joint" will still use a reducer, and the requirement for the reducer bearing is to be more sensitive and more precise. Flexible and lightweight. How to make it smaller and more refined, and how to ensure its consistency, is a new challenge we will face. At present, small batch development and trial production have begun. It is expected that the first batch of humanoid robot reducer bearings will start to be put on the market at the end of 2023. In the future, it will take 2 to 3 years for continuous optimization and improvement to achieve mass production.
