At the 2024 NLGI Annual Meeting, AXEL’s Prof. Johan Leckner presented a paper co-authored with Gabriel Calderon-Salmeron and Prof. Sergei Glavatskih of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The paper illustrates how friction losses in electrical motor bearings can be accurately measured under a wide range of speed conditions.

The paper concludes that in e-motor bearings operating for long periods of time, the carbon footprint originating from the energy losses will overshadow the carbon footprint of both the grease and the bearing.

The largest thickener effect seen is a reduction of 22% in friction losses, and the largest oil effect is 36%, corresponding to almost equally large reductions in carbon footprint from a cradle-to-grave perspective. Therefore, when selecting greases for e-motor bearings minimising friction losses must always be a top priority