Japan's Seiko NSK increases production of electric vehicle bearings

According to news on December 29, 2022, NSK will implement an equipment investment of 30 billion yen in the next five years to increase the production of bearings for electric vehicles such as pure electric vehicles (EV), and increase the operating income of electric vehicle bearings from the current Increase the scale of tens of billions of yen per year to 120 billion yen.

In Japan, NSK will increase equipment in factories that produce automobile wheel bearings. The company will also invest in equipment at a plant in Mexico that produces transmission bearings for the North American market in response to increased production of pure electric vehicle products.

NSK Jing Mingjun said that the current orders for electric vehicle bearings are expanding centered on Europe and China, and domestic purchases in Japan are also increasing smoothly."

Japan's NSK will disperse the production of bearings for electric vehicles to Southeast Asia, investing nearly 20 billion yen to build factories

As early as July 2022, Japan Seiko (NSK) decided to build a new bearing factory embedded with small motors in Southeast Asia, with an estimated investment of about 20 billion yen, and strive to put it into operation in 2024.

The small motor market is expected to grow in the future due to the shift from gasoline vehicles to electric vehicles (EV) and the expansion of investment in data centers. Japan's Seiko will increase production capacity in response to demand growth.

In the medium-term business plan released by Seiko Japan in May, it stated that by 2026, the operating income of the "industrial machinery business" composed of products for motors and machine tools will increase by about 100 billion yen compared with 2021, reaching 450 billion yen. Japan's Seiko will seize the demand from small motors through the construction of new bases and the enrichment of product lines, and plans to increase about 30 billion yen in the future.

NSK Develops New Method to Prevent Electric Corrosion in EV Drivetrains

NSK is developing a new, cost-effective method to prevent electrical corrosion in drive trains in electric vehicles,media reported.

Based on a unique, patented method of producing plastic over-moulded deep groove ball bearings, electric vehicle manufacturers Save a lot of money.

Due to conditions such as frequent inverter switching across multiple phases, parasitic currents can take multiple paths through the EV motor. Certain types of motor construction also cause various bearing currents to flow, including rotor ground bearing currents, circulating bearing currents and EDM (Electronic Discharge Machining) currents.

Especially EDM currents pose a serious risk to bearings, mainly due to arcing at certain voltages. These arcs (load charging) are uncontrolled discharges at relatively high currents, fundamentally changing the morphology of the steel bearing rings and balls. In this case, the material melts and re-solidifies on the metal surface, so that ripples a few microns deep start to appear on the bearing raceways of the inner and outer rings. This tends to cause problems with excessive noise in the first place