Making quiet living using NORGLIDE® - Self-lubricated plain bearings

Since clothes dryers are most often situated in the living areas of a home, the amount of noise that they make is an important factor for clothes dryer manufacturers to incorporate into their designs. Some of the main sources of these noises are due to bearings located within the inner workings of the dryer.

Self-lubricated plain bearings

Dryer drum support rollers tend to have oil impregnated bearings in them. Over time, the oil leaches out of the bearings which then causes accelerated wear of those bearings. This bearing wear results in noise during the operation of the dryer. The NORGLIDE^® PTFE liner is self-lubricated and does not use any external lubricants such as grease. Other common bearings used for drum support rollers need to be lubricated with grease, which tends to harden and lose its lubricating abilities after repeated heating cycles.

Reducing NVH

The NORGLIDE^® Bearing sliding material is PTFE, which has inherent noise & vibration dampening properties. So a NORGLIDE^® Bearing dampens noises and vibrations, so the vibrations – and the noise caused by those vibrations - will be less likely to pass between moving components.

On some dryer models, the rear drum bearing cup wears excessively and causes much noise when the dryer is operating. Traditional drum bearing cups require grease to be applied, and over time the grease no longer works, mainly due to the high drying temperatures. A NORGLIDE® insert within the rear drum bearing cup is self-lubricating and does not need any external application of grease.

Another advantage that NORGLIDE^® Bearings can provide is that they can help make electrical continuity, by features called notches, even though they have a polymer bearing interface surface, and this can eliminate the need for a grounding ball. This reduces the amount of components in the rear drum support mechanism, and eliminates a potential electrical safety problem if a grounding ball falls out of position.

Bushings for belt tensioner

For the dryer drum drive belt tensioner, the bearing interface freeplay can become larger than the belt tensioner’s capabilities due to bearing wear, so there is not adequate tension of the drive belt which can either cause the drive belt to slip on the drum or the drive belt can fall off the drive pulley. A long-life NORGLIDE^® Bearing can be designed for specific clearance, which avoids high freeplay so there is no rattling of rotating components.

Custom Bearings

Saint-Gobain has the materials engineering, product design, and manufacturing capabilities to develop and produce NORGLIDE^® Bearings of many different design types and in many different material grades. Based on our decades of design experience, we can develop and produce custom bearings of many different sizes to satisfy different performance requirements.