Schaeffler at EMO 2025 (Hall 6, Booth I46) Transforming industry trends into innovative products: Schaeffler with expanded portfolio for machine tools

2025-07-11 | Schweinfurt

• For the periphery of production machines: new four-row monorail guidance systems in the KLLT series with an X arrangement
• For automation in production plants: new YRTA & YRTAG rotary axis bearing series
• Excellent for short-stroke applications: screw drive bearings with ceramic balls

In the machine tool industry, automation, digitalization, and sustainability are the forces shaping machine architectures as well as key components such as spindles, linear axes, and rotary tables. Schaeffler takes these important industry trends and turns them into innovative bearing and drive solutions, which will be presented at EMO 2025.

Four-row monorail guidance systems for automation
Manufacturers need extremely low-maintenance and durable rotary axis bearing arrangements and linear guidance systems – for axes outside the machining work envelope as well as for workpiece and tool handling. They also want automation solutions offering a new optimum between function and economy that allows their investments to break even quickly. These are precisely the requirements that the new four-row monorail guidance systems in the KLLT series with an X arrangement meet. The systems complement the Schaeffler linear guidance system portfolio specifically to meet the requirements of the peripherals of production machines. The KLLT monorail guidance systems stand out through their ability to mate with substructures with minor shape errors more precisely and without creating significant constraint forces. With this, they open up new application possibilities for Schaeffler.

New rotary axis bearings for automation
For rotary axes outside the machining work envelope, Schaeffler engineers have developed the new YRTA (A = “Automation”) series from their proven YRTC rotary axis bearing series. With a modified manufacturing process and a new needle cage design, these double-acting axial roller radial needle bearings ideally meet requirements such as high tilting rigidity, long operating life, and low maintenance.

Sustainability as development criterion
In driven rotary tables, and especially those that are not used for simultaneous machining, a trend toward use of gear motors can be seen. To reduce the not insignificant amount of design work required for a rotary axis with gear drive, the installation space, the complexity, and the assembly time, Schaeffler developers came up with an innovative solution: YRTC and YRTA rotary axis bearings can be ordered with outer diameters formed as spur or helical gears (YRTCG, YRTAG). This gear takes the place of the spur or helical gear of the customer-side gear drive. Based on the required torque, the inner ring is designed with a suitable width and either spur or helical gear teeth. This solution is ideal for driving milling tables and swivel axes of bridge mills and milling heads or automation axes. AMOSIN angle measurement systems can still be integrated into the bearing arrangements and are still offered for these bearings.

New roller screw drives
With the acquisition of Ewellix and the harmonization of the product range, RGT ground roller screw drives in further sizes have been added to the portfolio of Schaeffler Linear Motion. Customers can now select sizes of 8 to 240 mm with load ratings of up to 4000 kN.

In the machine tool industry, these roller screw drives are used, for example, in feed axes of thread rolling machines, in drilling and milling heads, and as drives for broaching machines – in other words, wherever high forces, exact positioning, and monitoring of the force-displacement progression are required. Schaeffler offers a wide range of KGT ball screw drives for the important market of feed axes as well as the PWG planetary roller screw drive for special applications with low leads of less than 1 mm.

Problem solver for short-stroke applications
If a screw drive bearing in a feed spindle is continuously subjected to low swiveling angles, there is a danger that the lubricant will be forced out of the rolling contact region and the rolling bearing will be damaged due to insufficient lubrication (“false brinelling”). For these applications, Schaeffler offers a simple, practical, and efficient solution: the two-row angular ball bearings in the series ZKLN and ZKLF (with flange fastening) and the three-row variant, DKFLA, are provided with ceramic rolling elements. These designs offer a high level of operational reliability when short strokes and vibrations at standstill occur. The bearing dynamic load capacity and calculated life are not changed. The use of ceramic rolling elements even doubles the grease service life. Downtimes and service deployments due to false brinelling can be reliably avoided with these bearings.