What is the core equipment that our country has not mastered yet?

“Learn from the barbarians and develop skills to conquer the barbarians”, Wei Yuan’s cry a hundred years ago started the Chinese nation’s vigorous rescue operation. Shipping, guns, coal, telecommunications, these neglected fields were once again brought into the spotlight. Please come to the stage. Since Western countries were leading in science and technology at that time, our people had to learn a lot from their experience.

But now, our country has become a major manufacturing country in the world, has the most complete industrial production lines in the world, and has become the "world factory". However, due to the late start and the Western monopoly on my country's technology in certain fields, China's manufacturing still has many problems that it has not overcome. For example, widely used high-end bearings cannot be mass-produced, so we still need to import them from Germany and Japan. Purchased at twice the price.

The tortuous road of bearing research and development in my country

For those who are not familiar with the industry, the word "bearing" sounds very strange. In fact, it exists in almost every aspect of our lives. From bicycle parts to space stations traveling in the universe, as well as various household appliances, bearings are everywhere.

Bearings are an indispensable core component in mechanical equipment. When other machine components operate on the shaft, the component used to maintain the center position of the shaft and control the movement is the bearing. It can also reduce the rolling time of the rotating shaft. Due to mutual friction, various bearings can be said to be an extremely critical link in industrial society.

However, the current domestic bearing industry, like many other industrial sectors, has failed to break through key technologies. Although it can carry out mass production, the quality of the products produced is average. Therefore, our country is used in aerospace, High-end bearings in key fields such as the military or precision instruments such as clocks and watches still need to be imported from abroad.

Because it takes so much effort to develop a high-end bearing, we cannot easily mass-produce it without mastering the core technology, because the fault tolerance rate of the bearing is extremely low. If there is a slight mistake, high-end equipment will face problems. scrapped. The Chinese have never stopped exploring high-end bearing technology, and even achieved good results as early as 1999.

At the military parade that year, my country’s independently developed new tank 99A was unveiled. Its tank seat ring and turret seat ring were high-end bearings made by ourselves. This oversized rolling bearing not only allowed more than ten tons of The turret operates freely, and it also has to withstand the huge recoil at the moment the gun is ejected from the chamber. Most countries cannot make such a bearing.

But such a high-end bearing requires almost all the efforts of the country and consumes huge amounts of money. In addition to large bearings, various miniature bearings used in precision instruments are also difficult to break through. For example, the nail spiral is a high-end bearing. Although the components are small, there are many exquisite technologies hidden in them.

Unfortunately, China simply cannot spend a lot of effort to produce such high-end bearings that are very small and require a large number of applications like the bearings on tanks that are only used under extreme conditions. In fact, in China's aerospace and other fields, almost all the high-end bearings we use rely on imports.

We provide materials and buy them back at high prices

Some people may be very unconvinced. Since we can produce them ourselves, why not use domestically produced bearings? Data show that the actual life of bearings imported from abroad is more than 8 times the calculated life, even up to 30 times, and the reliability is greater than 98, while the life of domestic bearings is 3 times the calculated life, the highest is only 5 times, and the reliability is 96 about.

Such bearings may be used in some low-end machinery, but for parts with high requirements such as aviation and high-speed rail, we have to choose imported bearings. Currently, among the top ten bearing manufacturers in the world, there are five Japanese companies and two German companies. The high-end bearings of these two countries are also among the best in the world. Every year, China needs to spend more than ten times the price to import a large number of high-end bearings from Germany and Japan.

But it is also very helpless. Other people’s high-end bearings have small amplitude, low wear rate, low heat, and excellent quality. Our country’s huge industrial production needs, and such transactions every year also allow a lot of money to flow from the pockets of the Chinese people. foreign country.

The ambitions of foreign companies are far less than this. American companies have even built factories in Shandong, purchased low-end materials from China, used technology to make high-end bearings, and then resold them to China at ten times the price.

This is almost a common sense in developed countries. They purchase the raw materials needed to process bearings from China at low prices. Even the workers are Chinese, and the high-end products they finally produce are The bearings are then sold to China. They only need to master the technical principles to make huge profits from the Chinese.

Unwilling to lag behind others, Made in China rises

China has the largest labor market in the world, but it is technologically strangled by Western countries. Bearings need suitable materials and Lubricant, key mechanics knowledge and a lot of experimentation, that’s where we need to catch up. As early as 2014, China's bearing output ranked third in the world, and its bearing output in light industry ranked first in the world.

But in terms of reliability and lifespan in cutting-edge fields, it is still not as good as the West. However, we are working hard to catch up. In recent years, a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has made major discoveries in steelmaking through physical dissection and calculations of hundreds of tons of large steel ingots, breaking through the technical bottleneck of rare earth applications in the steelmaking industry, and pushing the material for the production of high-end bearings to a new level. steps.

At the same time, many cities have built high-end bearing manufacturing plants and have made many breakthroughs. At present, the smallest bearing diameter that can be manufactured in China is only 0.6 mm, the largest bearing diameter is 11 meters, and the largest and The large span between the smallest shows the comprehensiveness of our technology. The country attaches great importance to breakthroughs in bearing technology. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has planned 8 national-level technology platforms and units in the bearing field.

With the rapid progress of industrial technology, the nationalization of high-end bearings in many fields has also been put on the agenda. At present, there has been substantial progress in the localization of high-speed rail bearings, and it is planned to realize the production of wind turbines this year. Independent research on high-end bearings aims to increase the usage rate of domestic bearings in this field to 90%. Perhaps ten years from now, our domestically produced large aircraft will also be able to use our own domestically produced high-end bearings.

Faced with the technology monopoly of Western countries and the huge gap, the Chinese have never given up. Made in China was once labeled as "cheap" and "low-end" and was laughed at by many Western countries. , but now China's industrial technology is developing rapidly, and Chinese manufacturing accounts for an increasing proportion of the world, becoming the object of various countries competing to purchase. These are inseparable from the sweat of generations of Chinese industrialists, and the mass in their hearts Unyielding passion has made Made in China world-renowned.

Although it is just a component of machinery, high-end bearings are proof of a country’s cutting-edge science and technology. From a black eye to the world's industrial power, the Chinese have overcome countless difficulties. High-end bearings are another big mountain we face. However, with the efforts of thousands of technicians and workers, domestic high-end bearings will definitely be in the world. The near future will amaze the world.