Dental Bearings

As a major supplier to the dental market Barden has been at the forefront of developments to improve dental turbine bearing performance. With a continuous improvement program that has spanned the last 25 years, Barden has developed a range of bearings ideally suited for the high speed dental handpiece turbine OEM and replacement markets.

Operating in a highly demanding environment, handpiece turbines rotate at speeds of up to 500,000 rpm and are subjected to repeated sterilisation cycles. However, a range of features enable Barden bearings to tackle these difficulties directly. All bearings have super honed finished raceways with strict controls of roundness, harmonic amplitudes and lobing patterns, resulting in consistently higher speeds.

Barden dental bearings are available in both deep groove and angular contact configurations, and can be supplied with or without shields enabling lubricant retention and the exclusion of contaminants. The improved sealing design offered by Barden reduces the critical gap between the integral shield and the bearing inner ring to just 0.050mm, a 60% reduction compared to conventional shield and cir-clip designs. The benefits include:

• Overcomes the problem of shield ejection
• Improved contamination exclusion
• Greater lubricant retention
• Reduced operating noise caused by compressed air passing through the bearing

Some types of dental bearings are available with flanged or stepped outer ring OD's for O-ring location and all bearings can be supplied with silicon nitride ceramic balls. These balls add the advantage of lower centrifugal ball loads at the high rotational speed of the turbine. These lower loads produce less stress between the balls and the cage, resulting in the cages generally withstanding a greater number of sterilisation cycles than bearings with steel balls. A range of cage materials offering sterilisation resistance is also available.

Cleanliness is obviously essential with dental bearings. Barden has over 1700 sqm of fully equipped cleanroom facilities where all assembly, testing and packing operations take place. As with all Barden products, full technincal support is provided for the product line from a team of specialist engineers. A laboratory running test fixtures with vibration and speed monitoring, sterilisation equipment and full resources to conduct bearing examinations of all types is also available.