ZKL bearings for the safe operation of a hydropower plant

The bearings will support the reliable operation of a butterfly valve at a pumped-storage hydropower plant equipped with a Francis turbine. The butterfly valve regulates the flow of water to the turbine and also plays a critical safety role. In an emergency, it must be capable of quickly shutting off the water supply and bringing the turbine to a standstill.

The valve is mounted vertically on two ZKL 232/750 spherical roller bearings from the NEW FORCE range and supported by an axial spherical plain bearing. This arrangement places high demands on load-carrying capacity, bearing design and the long-term reliability of the entire assembly. To meet these requirements, we also used finite element analysis when designing the bearing geometry. This allowed us to assess how the design behaves under load and optimise its configuration. The resulting bearing arrangement is designed to ensure the safe rotation of machinery components with a combined weight of more than 300 tonnes. To put this into perspective, that is equivalent to the load carried by more than five fully loaded railway freight wagons.