Counterfeiting rolling bearings is an illegal and unethical practice that could endanger operations and human lives. In addition, when you pay for premium high-performance bearings, but you get only poor faulty products, you get cheated.

Even skilled and experienced technicians may find it difficult to tell the difference between genuine and fake bearings without the appropriate tools. That’s why RKB decided to open its highly specialized laboratories to its customers and to users of rolling bearings worldwide to help them make the right choice and get what they paid for. Besides, RKB Swiss Labs offer consultancy and technical support in formal complaints and legal disputes.

Some of the most requested services include:

• bearing dimensional and form compliance (diameters, lengths, roundness, cylindricity etc.)
• bearing surface quality analysis (roughness, profile etc.)
• bearing raw material metallurgy and metallography controls (chemical composition, microstructure, non-metallic inclusions etc.)
• bearing mechanical properties assessment (hardness, case layer depth etc.)

RKB Swiss Labs can perform a full bearing root cause failure analysis (RCFA) through which it is possible to:

• identify the mechanisms that caused the bearing to fail in a specific application
• assess bearing steel cleanliness for the eligibility process of steel suppliers
• analyze steel microstructure and hardness to validate heat treatment processes
• investigate fracture nucleation and growth using the latest optical microscopy techniques
• magnetic particle inspection (MPI) to identify superficial defects