Orbit Bearings, a leading home-grown bearings solutions provider, has made rapid progress over the past 25 years, since inception in 1991. It has graduated from being a manufacture-oriented company to a knowledge-based engineering entity, specializing in design, testing and customizing bearing solutions as per specific customer requirements. Its most remarkable achievement was the setting up of the Orbit Technology Centre to provide customer-specific bearing solutions. Hub (unitised) bearings for axle applications was one such solution which Orbit has successfully engineered over the span of eight years and has been exporting to European truck and trailer OEMs. Today Orbit is India’s largest exporter of hub bearings.
Unplanned maintenance and downtime are among the major problems faced by truck users. This reduces their earnings since vehicles prove profitable only when they are on the road. It is keeping these problems in mind that Orbit came up with the truck hub units.
Orbit’s state-of-the-art technology plant in Rajkot manufactures advanced hub bearings that help achieve greater life cycle cost savings. The company today can boast of providing bearings with a life of one million km. Its special testing facility includes road simulation & endurance testing systems (RSETS), used to validate the performance of a bearing, axle-stub and hub together, as in actual on-road condition.
Truck hub units are specially designed to withstand the tough operating condition of commercial vehicles. With reduced installation time, they virtually eliminate installation errors because they are maintenance-free, pre-adjusted, lubricated for life and are pre-sealed. They also provide hassle-free assembly for the truck manufacturer as well as the field service engineer.
The Orbit Technology Centre, the R&D wing, has contributed substantially to the success of hub bearings in European markets. The centre uses advanced software for designing and analysis of bearings. The software enables 3-dimensional designing of bearings, bearing selection based on application, bearing design optimization, stress analysis of bearings and bearing life calculations using modern standards (DIN ISO 281 Sup 4).
The software can study the effects of thermal expansion, contamination, high-speed effects, misalignments, preload, micro geometry, lubricant film thickness & bending on performance of bearing.
Orbit can also validate designs by testing the prototypes with RSETS, single axis torture test, scrub test, etc.