Research on Lubricant Leakage in Spiral Groove Bearing

摘要

In recent years, bearings for spindle motors have been required for high-speed rotation with high accuracy due to a remarkable improvement of storage capacity and processing speed in digital devices. In order to comply with such requirements, Spiral Groove Bearings (SGB) have been adopted in the spindle motors. Despite the excellent features, SGB has a practical problem of causing leakage of lubricants. Therefore, from the viewpoint of design, the critical issue is to establish certain countermeasures against the leakage. This paper describes the analysis focused on the tapered radial clearance, which is the main cause of the leakage, and shows that it coincides with the experimental results.