PTFE Composite Thrust Pad Developed to Address Key Weaknesses of Traditional Babbitt Pads

With the hydropower industry continuing to move towards the goal of more efficient, more reliable, and longer-life operation, the innovation of materials and techniques for key components has become the focus of industry attention. Recently, a new type of PTFE composite thrust pad for hydro generators, independently developed by our company, has completed the manufacturing of engineering samples and performance evaluation. This marks that our company has achieved another breakthrough in high-performance bearing material technology.

This kind of bearing pad has comprehensively upgraded the traditional structure and performance. Under the long-term continuous operating conditions of a water turbine, the traditional babbitt thrust pad usually adopts a babbitt alloy as the casting layer, whose wear resistance is limited, and it easily causes fatigue damage under high-load and high-speed working conditions, while its service life is shorter than that of the F-4 thrust block.

In order to solve these problems, the engineering team of our company conducted extensive experimental verification and material comparison, and eventually adopted a multi-layer composite to replace the traditional babbitt alloy, which can significantly improve overall wear resistance, fatigue resistance, and stability.

The new hydrodynamic thrust pad adopts a four-layer structural design:

The first layer uses a wear-resistant layer made by mixing modified tetrafluoroethylene with tetrafluoroethylene, which has an extremely low coefficient of friction and excellent self-lubricating performance. These properties allow it to maintain stable operation under boundary lubrication or even short-term oil-shortage conditions.

The second layer uses copper wire pads as the transition layer, which enhances the overall toughness of the material and helps prevent peeling and delamination. At the same time, it ensures that the load on the friction layer is more evenly distributed.

The third layer is the brazed connection layer, which enables the composite materials to be firmly bonded and provides structural stability for high-load working conditions.

The fourth layer is a steel base layer, ensuring that the thrust bearing has sufficient mechanical strength under high-speed and high-pressure working conditions.

Compared with the traditional structure, the new composite thrust bearing pad shows more obvious advantages, such as higher wear resistance, stronger fatigue resistance, more stable friction performance, and a longer service life. In the wear-resistance and load tests conducted to simulate the actual operation of a hydraulic turbine, this product demonstrated a lower wear rate and a smoother friction curve, and its overall lifespan is expected to reach 2 to 3 times that of a traditional Babbitt alloy thrust shoe.

Since its establishment, our company has always been committed to enhancing our product competitiveness through material innovation and technological breakthroughs. The successful development of this tilting thrust pad not only expands our technical reserves in precision components in the bearing field, but also provides more reliable and more economical new solution methods for the hydropower industry. In the future, our company will continue to promote the application research of this type of composite material in more heavy-duty equipment, further serving the high-quality development of the global power industry.