Something a little differant

[Mark Bullard]

That's a good one.

 

[Mark Bullard]

Ok I promise more pictures as we broke down the motor. This motor is a vertical pump motor. Most are what we call hollow shaft. The pump shaft comes thru the motor and connects at the top. These motors are designed to take a lot of thrust load from the pump. A pump will pull down as it suck water into the intake of the impeller. To carry the thrust these motors have one to a stack of thrust bearings to carry this load. I have seen one bearing up to four bearings in a stack. This is all by design. This motor has what we call a "Spherical Roller Bearing" and it to will take a lot of load. All these type of bearing setup run in a well of oil.

 

[John Beardslee]

Mark have done any of the drive motors for the TVA induced draft fans? I was an intern at Clarage Fan in the engineering dept. when we built the fans. HUGE! Dual stage, housings were 43 ft tall. Tip velocity was just under the speed of sound. RPM was under 400 if I remember.

 

[Mark Bullard]

We use to do some years ago. But all of their coal fired plants have shut down close to us. Some of the plants around us have some big fans. We do a lot of balancing in house. We have the best machines in the south beside the jet engine shops. We have two Hoffman hard bearing machines. These are the same machines that most jet engine shop use. We can handle about 7' in diameter and up to 15,000 lbs. in the big machine.

 

[RaceMechaniX]

Mark so those spherical bearings just sit in an oil bath or is there an external pump or integral pump that flushes them? Looks like just a simple bath.

 

[Mark Bullard]

Mark so those spherical bearings just sit in an oil bath or is there an external pump or integral pump that flushes them? Looks like just a simple bath.

It just sets in the bath. There is a metering hole that allows the bearing to move oil thru it. It will move the oil from the bottom thru the bearing and out the top. When they run you can see the oil moving thru the bearing. On the bigger motors we will run with the top cover plate off to watch the oil to make sure it is moving right. Will try and take a little video of this going on.

 

[Mark Bullard]

Ok I promise video of the motor running looking into the top where the bearing runs. Some motors will allow you to do this with no problem if there not running to fast. Even thou this motor is only running at 800 rpm's, this motor has a lot of cooling fins to help cool the oil that really starts to splash up out of the motor. But I was able to take a little video before it got real bad and we shut it down to put the cap on.