China's modern bearing industry began to sprout in the late Qing Dynasty, went through a long period of stagnation, and did not develop until liberation.In 2018, China's bearing industry has developed more than 1,400 enterprises above the designated size, including 21.5 billion sets of rolling bearings annually and 6.18 billion sets of rolling bearings exported.China's bearing industry ranks the third in the world with a market share of about 20% of the global market.
The decade from the 1990s to the beginning of the 21st century was the rapid development stage of China's bearing industry. During this period, five industrial clusters were successively built in eastern Zhejiang, Yangtze River Delta, Wafangdian in Liaoning, Liaocheng in Shandong and Luoyang in Henan.
China's bearing industry has developed rapidly, but also has the same bottleneck as other industrial industries - large but not strong.China is already the world's largest manufacturer and seller of low - and medium-end bearings, but it has little say in high-end bearings.High-end bearing products and manufacturing technology in the world are basically monopolized by Sweden, Germany, Japan and the United States. China imports about $4 billion of bearings every year, 70% of which are high-end bearings for civilian use.
The development of bearing is inseparable from the development of bearing material and precision manufacturing.
1. Materials technology
The steel used to make bearings is called bearing steel.Yin Ruiyu, a famous metallurgical expert and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, once pointed out that "bearing steel used to make balls, cones, rods and suits have different requirements on the quality of the material. If the same steel is used to make the products, the quality of the products will definitely be questionable".Foreign companies have developed and applied different kinds of steel for bearing parts of different sizes and USES, while domestic bearing steel varieties are relatively single, which cannot fully meet the manufacturing requirements of high-end bearing.
There are also problems with the quality of steel.China has more than 20 steel enterprises with bearing steel production capacity, taking Xingcheng Special Steel as an example, its bearing steel has been ranked first in the world for nine consecutive years, and a large number of exports to Sweden SKF, Germany SCHAEFFLER (FAG), Japan NTN and other world-famous bearing enterprises.It shows that the quality of bearing steel products in China is internationally recognized and even reaches the advanced level of the world.But there are also a considerable number of enterprises, bearing steel product quality is not satisfactory, and even some inferior products fish in troubled waters, disturbing the bearing steel market environment.
This is the current problem in the bearing steel industry.
2. Precision manufacturing technology
The advanced level of forming processing technology of well-known bearing companies abroad is reflected in:
High degree of automation, the general use of automatic production line, and equipped with online detection, automatic sorting, in order to reduce human error product consistency, high hardness after heat treatment uniformity;Focus on surface morphology.
Precision technology tests the hardware equipment, artificial technology, enterprise ingenuity and so on. The gap in manufacturing technology in China is mainly reflected in high-precision processing equipment and process stability, detection and test technology, data processing and accumulation, digital modeling and simulation analysis and other aspects.
