What Is A Bearing? What Purpose Does It Serve?

Bearings are a family of machine components designed to reduce friction between moving parts while supporting relative motion.

With new fads emerging almost every other week, you have almost certainly come across a fidget spinner at some point in the last couple years. These tiny whirring toys took the world by storm, and no age group was immune. When their designs no longer appealed to overly creative people, they set about making their own versions—picking out the ball bearings and wrapping fancy contraptions of their own making around them.

Jewel bearings are special types of slider bearings that are used in the construction of mechanical watches. The bearing surfaces are lined with synthetic sapphire or ruby, which helps reduce friction, while maintaining dimensional accuracy of the system.

2. Magnetic Bearings

Magnetic bearings are frictionless bearings that utilize levitation by means of a strong magnetic field. While they have not gained popularity yet, owing to their size and high costs, they are an upcoming trend, as they can function in vacuum and without lubrication. Magnetic bearings are becoming increasingly popular in machines like compressors, turbines, motors, generators and pumps.

3. Fluid Bearings

Fluid bearings are another example of contactless bearings where a thin layer of pressurized fluids prevents contact between the surfaces in motion. The advantage of fluid bearings is their near-zero wear and noiseless operations, making them useful for high-speed and high-precision applications.

They are commonly used in hard drive motors. Another common example of such bearing surfaces is an air hockey table, where the puck ‘floats’ on a layer of air issuing from small holes on the table surface!