Thordon Bearings’ Reliable, Environmentally Friendly Bearings and Seals

Thordon Bearings’ Reliable, Environmentally Friendly Bearings and Seals

Ryan Edmonds carries out an oil-to-water guide bearing conversion in India for Andritz.

Thordon Bearings, Inc., is a family-owned business engaged in the manufacturing of high-performance oil- and grease-free bearing systems, seals, and other shaft line products for the global marine, clean power, pump, and industrial markets. The company is headquartered in Burlington, Ontario. In this interview, Ryan Edmonds, Thordon’s business development manager for hydropower, tells us about the advantages of Thordon’s water-lubricated bearings, Thorseals, and other products.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Ryan Edmonds: I started working at Thordon Bearings in 2008 as a member of the marketing team. In 2011, I moved to our global service and support department. This position involved significant travel around the world to market and assist with installations of our products. In 2017, I moved to the role of business development manager for our hydropower and pump business. With manufacturing facilities in Canada and Poland and an extensive network of more than 100 distributors throughout the world, Thordon Bearings is truly a global operation. The beauty of my position is that I can see our customers’ needs and the solutions firsthand. I can then share this knowledge directly with our distributors, which helps our customers and supports the growth of our business.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about Thordon Bearings’ main product lines.

Ryan Edmonds: Thordon Bearings is a world-leading manufacturer of oil- and grease-free bearing systems and seals for the clean power market. We offer water-lubricated main shaft guide bearings and segmented shaft seals, both radial and axial. Thordon wicket gate, operating mechanism, and linkage bearings operate wet or dry and eliminate the cost, maintenance, and pollution risk associated with greased bearings. We also offer bearings and shaft seal water conditioning systems.

Hydro Leader: How many employees does Thordon have?

Ryan Edmonds: Thordon Bearings has approximately 130 employees, including our sales, manufacturing, and administrative teams. Most of them are based at our Burlington, Ontario, facility, and approximately 15 are at our location in Poland.

Hydro Leader: How do technologies differ in hydro facilities around the world, and how does that affect your business?

Ryan Edmonds: The basic underlying technologies are relatively similar, but generally speaking, the farther east you go, the newer the facilities and technology. For example, in North America, there are operational facilities that were constructed as far back as the late 1890s, but in a place like Vietnam, the oldest hydro facilities only date back to the 1970s. While the functionality of the equipment can be similar, the designs, approaches, and types of equipment often differ. For example, the use of water-lubricated bearings has been pretty standard throughout Russia’s hydropower history. In North America, however, water lubrication was largely replaced by oil lubrication in the 1950s, largely due to the predictable service life of oil-lubricated bearings over the early water-lubricated designs and materials. Environmental concerns and technological advances with polymer bearings and water conditioning systems have seen the pendulum begin to swing back toward water-lubricated approaches, but the shift has been slow in North America.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your work in customer service.

Ryan Edmonds: Having come from the service side, it’s particularly important to me to ensure that customer outcomes are successful. When you are working with hydro utilities, each turbine unit can be configured differently, so I like to get on site, see things directly, provide advice, and ensure that installations are being done correctly. This is particularly important with our product, because while installations are not exceptionally difficult, there are differences. For example, when moving from an oil-lubricated to a water-lubricated system, we want to make sure that the new system is correct and does not result in negative experiences or perceptions. Customers appreciate this attention, and it also provides knowledge that can be used to assist with other customer needs and installations. It really is a win all the way around. This technology also does away with concerns about oil and grease getting into our rivers and lakes.

Hydro Leader: How do your bearings differ from oillubricated bearings?

Ryan Edmonds: In a typical turbine with an oil-lubricated main shaft guide bearing, there is a bottom bearing next to the runner with a seal underneath that keeps water away from it and out of the plant. In our water-lubricated main shaft guide bearing system, the bearing is beside the runner and the seal is on top of the bearing, so the orientation is different. With oil-lubricated bearings, you do not need to account for potential corrosion, so they can run with mild steel shafts. With water-lubricated bearings like Thordon’s, it’s important to have a stainless liner on the shaft or sleeve for running contact to preclude any potential corrosion. But the water system also makes things simpler, because it does not require oil coolers, filters, or the purchase and storage of oil; that also reduces environmental worries.

Our approach provides performance advantages because the bearing is closer to the runner, providing greater support than it would if it were higher up. It stiffens the entire unit, which contributes to smooth performance and can potentially increase efficiency. It is an improvement from a maintenance perspective as well. Having the shaft seal on top means you can work on it while it is operating instead of having to dismantle the guide bearings to service the shaft seal underneath the bearing. You can service and renew a Thordon bearing in a few hours if needed, while the time frame for servicing an oil bearing would be measured in weeks or months. Also, our product is environmentally friendly, because we’re not putting oil on top of the head cover. Those three big advantages to using a water-lubricated bearing in a hydro turbine explain why we are doing so many conversions of existing units from oil- to water-lubricated systems.

Most of these conversions have occurred in Canada, Europe, and Asia. Unfortunately, the pace of those conversions has been much slower in the U.S. market. We believe that sticking with the oil-lubricated model will ultimately not be sustainable, both because of the service and operational efficiencies of water-lubricated systems like ours and because of the longterm downsides of oil lubrication. Thordon Bearings is a green company, and we only support and advocate technologies that are consistent with that mindset.

Hydro Leader: Is the water-lubricated bearing closed to the outside water source, or is it open to the regular water flow?

Ryan Edmonds: Generally, water is diverted from the penstock or the header to flow through the guide bearing. The guide bearing is open to the top of the runner, so the water just continues on. Because there is an abundant water supply in these instances, it is not repeatedly recycled, just pumped through. We sell water quality conditioning and regulation units that assist with this process, and in many cases, customers already have variations of these installed in their plants, which can sometimes work for this process as well. The filtration elements are important, because they ensure that the bearings are being lubricated with clean water. When they are, these systems can last for decades without noteworthy wear. That is why Thordon is able to provide a 25‐year wear life guarantee on propeller shaft bearings in the marine industry. In the hydro market, we offer only a 15‐year wear life guarantee on wicket gate bearings. Our standard marine industry propeller shaft bearing 25‐year wear life guarantee doesn’t apply to main shaft guide bearings because there are too many variables between stations, even though with the right design, reaching 25 years or more of life is achievable. Although we’ve never had unexplainable bearing failures, we want customers to know that they are securing a quality product. We have the operational experience with thousands of applications all over the world, and we are selling about 60,000 bearings a year, including our pump bearings.

Hydro Leader: What are the bearings made of?

Ryan Edmonds: All the bearing running surfaces are nonmetallic. For full-rotation, higher-speed bearing applications, they are elastomeric. We also have thermoplastic wicket gates for higher-load-bearing material. The fullrotation elastomeric polymer products are not designed to carry extremely high loads; they are designed for the limits of the lubricating water. By contrast, the wicket gate material, ThorPlas-Blue, is capable of high pressure, exceeding what’s actually required by several times in slow-moving applications. While we are proud to know that we have engineered something with that capability, we don’t focus on that in our marketing, since a typical load would never approach that level.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about Thordon’s Thorseals.

Ryan Edmonds: Thorseals are machined elastomeric seals that are used for wicket gates and many other applications. One of the trends we are seeing in the industry is that companies are trying to save money by installing rubber seals in such applications. The problem is that, as stated in their design manuals, rubber seals tend to crack and fail after 5–7 years, which is incompatible with the goal of building a turbine that will run for 40–50 years without service. By compromising in the near term, users end up with additional expenses and downtime in the longer term. Our elastomeric seal does not require that sort of service. The Thorseal will perform for the life of the equipment it is installed in. Because it is machined to suit the application over its lifetime and never needs to be replaced, the Thorseal’s initial cost is often higher than that of a traditional rubber seal, but the savings on service make it much more cost effective.

Hydro Leader: Do the bearings also have a longer operational life than the equipment they are tied to?

Ryan Edmonds: It depends on the station. Some hydro stations are rebuilt every 5 years, while others have never been rebuilt in 50. I can say that if the bearings are designed and set up correctly, they will certainly not be the reason the equipment needs to come down for service. We often see comparisons of our material and other materials, and when it comes to waterlubricated wicket gate bearings, we view our products as far ahead of the curve. Similarly, with main shaft guide bearing performance, while there are some valid competitors in this space, we again believe our product is at the top.

Hydro Leader: What other challenges does the company face today?

Ryan Edmonds: Across the board, metal prices are a lot higher than they were a year ago. That’s not normal, but it’s the same sort of thing we are seeing in most other sectors—lumber, for example. Everyone seems to suggest that these increased prices are related to the COVID‐19 pandemic, but while that has begun to settle, we have not seen the price of metals ease yet. A lot of what we do has a long lead time, but the longer this disruption continues, the more it will affect potential customers’ interest in initiating change and upgrades.

Regulations are certainly not what they should be to eliminate oil and grease from our rivers and lakes. For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ specifications are still committed to using grease, even though the rest of the world stopped using grease 25 years ago.

Hydro Leader: What is your company’s vision for the future?

Ryan Edmonds: Our vision is to see oil- and grease-free bearings in every application possible, whether our products or not, because we see their use as an easy way to end a systemic source of water pollution. There are a lot of good solutions out there that don’t require the use of oil and grease next to the waterway. We advocate environmentally friendly solutions in this realm. We have a great deal of interesting information on our website on these matters, and I encourage readers to take a look.

Our ultimate hope is that people take the time to compare product solutions, accurately considering the near- and longterm implications of their decisions. Initially, change may cost a little more, but in the long term, our products are more costeffective, pollute less, and sustain a cleaner environment.

One of the problems with hydro units today is that they are so reliable that if they are built with oil-lubricated applications, they are likely to be causing pollution for 25 years or more. Today, when people do things around their homes, they are quite environmentally responsible and actually stop to think about the effect of their actions on the environment around them. It is important that people begin to translate that level of consciousness to the workplace, and I think we are already beginning to see this to varying degrees. Thordon Bearings has continued to address matters like this through its website, webinars, and other means. We want to educate the public, regardless of whether we are ultimately the company people decide to work with.

Ryan Edmonds is the business development manager for hydropower at Thordon Bearings Inc. He can be contacted at ryane@thordonbearings.com. For more about Thordon Bearings, visit www.thordonbearings.com.