Forget ceramic, Coo Space loses the grease to get 10x less bearing friction!

Interesting. Anyone have data on hand about the drivetrain loss attributable to the bottom bracket? Related: I’ve noticed that pedals seem to have a relatively high amount of drag…

A practical application for space – under load, without heat dissipation, those bearings will lose material quicker than your mother can unbutton her coveralls. Think of what will happen.

Lubrication’s purposes include a few things, one is to reduce friction, but the other has to do with trapping elements that would cause wear to parts. This is why we change oil in our cars an bikes, it’s not that the oil is bad at that point, but particles start to build up.

Without the lube catching dirt and grime, I wonder how these will react to build up and wear.

Use those lubes on the outermost seals to keep the gunk from migrating into the rolling assembly. Seems pretty interesting for the “ultimate” in drag reduction. The reality is that these parts will likely lose tolerance fairly fast compared to traditional ball bearings…

Is nice to see some new thinking though.

There’s a major point people seem to be missing: similar steels will gall when in direct contact. That essentially means cold welding. Metal bearings with no lube will stick to the races when in contact and then tear out tiny bits as they’re forced to lose contact. That’s what galling is.

One of the major uses of full ceramic bearings is in environments where lubricants won’t work, such as space and inside industrial furnaces. You can run full ceramic bearings without any lube. You can even run hybrid ceramic bearings without lube because you don’t have steel in contact with steel, so there is no galling.

Fun fact: if you put one metal plate on another of the same material, they don’t stick. This is mostly due to the air and thin oxide layer separating them. (Titanium, stainless steel and aluminum all develop a thin oxide layer. That’s what keeps them from corroding further). In space, there’s no air and therefore no oxygen to create an oxide layer. So similar metals in contact tend to weld to each other pretty firmly.

PbJoe, the oil in a car’s engine isn’t there to trap particulates. What’s going on is that even engines with lubrication generate those particulates, and they naturally end up in the oil. Oil filters generally do a fine job of catching these. But in cars, the oil really does “go bad.” engine oil’s viscosity and shear strength degrade in the presence of heat, so used oil eventually breaks down and doesn’t lubricate as well as it did when it was new. Synthetic oils last much longer in the presence of heat, which is why manufacturers’ recommended oil change intervals have stretched from 3,000 miles 20 years ago to 7,500-15,000 miles today. It’s because synthetic oil doesn’t “go bad” as fast as dino oil does.

Wow, lot of engineers on this forum. Instead of posting on the internet, complaining about other people’s projects, why not go start a company yourselves? Evidently, this company forgot to hire all the top-level ball bearing engineers who have suddenly come out of the woodwork.

Even Fletch knows it…. “It’s all ball bearings these days”

Neat idea but talk to me when they are installed into a less-than-perfect-tolerance frame and then inconsistently loaded and unloaded over time. Grease helps give a little tolerance to things that are not a perfect fit….you heard me…and it’s Friday night…bow chica wow wow.

Luigi has a good point. Is this about eliminating grease, or eliminating the cages that keep the bearings separated?

I’m curious about how the inner bearing surface maintains proper tolerances where the grooves create a larger diameter outer bearing surface.

10x less bearing friction – even if it is true, does it matter? What percentage of total resistance for a competition cyclist is due to bearing friction?

My limited understanding is that while aerodynamic resistance increases exponentially with speed, bearing resistance hardly increases at all, so it becomes less significant the faster you go. If it is 1% it might help win a competition. If it is 0.1%, it wouldn’t be detectable outside of labs, would it?

While there are polymer (plastic) ball bearings in production that do not need lubrication, they’re a bit unproven and have some known limitations.

These… well, I’m not buying it.

Jason K, great posts by the way, but car oil is designed to trap particulates, in fact lubes and traps. Worked for Pennzoil for a number of years.

Also, the video doesn’t show the bearings under any load. That’s the whole idea of bearings, to carry a load.

@54 Yes, there must be some acceleration/deceleration losses, but these could of course be less than losses due to grease and ball cages (one pic shows some grease, but that might be there only to illustrate the principle). The acceleration/deceleration might even out over the whole bearing – as one ball spins up, another slows down, returning it’s energy to the bearing. In that case there is only minimal frictional losses.

Interesting tech, but uncertain at this point if it will ever be applicable to bikes. It’s probably good for some uses but certainly not for all.

Whoa! This is a HUGE development not just for bikes, but automotive, motorcycle, industrial machinery, and ANY type of machine or vehicle that uses ball bearings.

The theoretical calculation with getting rid of grease and the race retainer would result in significantly reduced friction. In theory up to 10x less friction. If this bearing retainer system can even give half of the theoretical results the results would be astounding.

Cat 5 riders would turn into Cat 1 riders. At least on the flats.

JasonK thanks for your post. That actually was very interesting.

I have two concerns here-
First is the increase in the hertzian contact stress of the the balls as they pass over the ‘divot’.
Second if the noise in the torque trace caused by this motion. For a space application, you’d typically use lead or MoS2 (Molybdenum disulfide) sputter coated races with a leaded bronze cage. After run in and the ball track has formed, you would expect a very low level of noise. Having a hole that the bearings drop into is not going to help that.
For reference, bearings I was testing yesterday (for space application) have torque resistance of around 1mNm with noise in region of 0.1mNm.

Oh i know, it’s not at all.
Anyway, these are an interesting development for space bearings (my job is testing bearings for space applications), its interesting that if you google coo space bearings, how many bike sites are reporting this. I can’t foresee them being suitable for low tolerance applications like bikes.

mabuse,
how about the balls ? still there ?
I think balls are gone too, spinning with ‘thick’ mud.
You better check your chain, noise can come from your dirty chain.

Wow soooo interestingly cool. I just love bicycles, making em, breaking em. best thing ever for the amateur bike mechanic….who knows not of bearing casings…yet..lol

unless I am being really thick?

didn’t we have major problems with ‘full contact’ bearings in mountain bike applications some years back – I’m specifically thinking of Race Face X-Type bottom brackets which had a crazy short service life compared to Shimano HT2 with their retainer space ball bearings?

if I remember correctly, and please correct me as i was an industrial designer, not a full blown engineering guy, the lack of a retainer in the X-Type BB’s meant the bearings would quickly lose their free rotation once the bearing package was contaminated, whilst the lubricant-impregnated polymer retainer in the HT2 BB meant those bearings kept on turning even when contaminted?

The Raceface BB’s mostly failed due to poor grease characteristics, and some poor quality assurance. Raceface ended up building a monster of a test machine that weighed some ~400lbs and would bash the shit out of BB’s and run water through them and ran this weird cam system for loading and such, and through extensive testing have done amazing things with their new BB’s. Shame the tester got scrapped in the move to their new location though. Probably worth a few hundred dollars just in steel scrap.

I have no opinion on these new possibly improved bearings.Am curious though,wouldnt these bearings be subjected to all kinds of grueling real world test before ever making claims and sending them out to other companies?

Thanks Joe

I’ve made roller bearings that did not need a cage, and did not use any grease or oil. I used magnets for the rollers. They were installed to repulse each other, thereby keeping a uniform distance. But dust seals were an issue…

Skeptical until they show an application. I can strip a bearing of grease and have it spin for a few seconds too. Throw these on a set of rollerblades or on a skateboard or something to show how they will deal with heat or pressure not just free spinning on a table next to a bearing loaded with thick grease