Student Engineer in the Bearings Department

Sounds official right? That's because it is! About a month ago I got hired on at US Synthetic. This is the place that I worked at over the summer. US Synthetic is a company that mainly makes diamond bit cutters. Or in other words, they make synthetic diamonds to   put on oil drills to dig down into the Earth. Why diamonds? Because they are one of the hardest materials available.

During the summer I was a member of the press maintenance team. 

I worked on big presses like this:

To give you some perspective, this machine is probably 10 ft tall and weighs up to 80 tons. I would build, repair, and diagnose the presses. It was hard, laborious work, but I learned a lot and had fun.


I wanted to continue working there when school started, but they didn't have a part time position open in that area. So I stopped working and was just going to be a full time student. But a few weeks later, I heard about a job opening in the bearings department for a student engineer part time. I was super excited and applied for the job. After a few interviews, I was finally selected to be a part of the Bearings team!



I spend most of my time designing thrust/radial bearings for our customers. I found a site online that explains what we do.


"The company's bearing lineup includes radial bearings and thrust bearings, primarily for the oil and gas drilling industry. The bearings are designed for use in down hole motors, turbines, rotary steerable systems, drilling tools, heavy industrial equipment, and a variety of pump applications. Pump applications include extreme conditions transfer pumps, electric submersible pumps, stationary pumps, and injection pumps.


The bearing bodies themselves are machined from stainless steel. The antifriction surfaces placed into the bodies are polycrystalline diamond pads that have been built up on tungsten carbide substrates, then formed, precision machined, and placed with high precision.



The first picture is of thrust bearings. 

Other advantages of PCD bearings include their relatively small size for the load-carrying capacity, allowing tight packaging and exposure to extreme conditions. Also, because the bearings do not rely on rolling elements and have no moving parts, they have fewer failure modes and operational limitations."

In the picture just above, you see large and small diameter radial bearings.



It's been a lot of fun trying to solve problems as they come at work and I'm enjoying having a job with the word "engineer" in the position title.



Something interesting about US Synthetic is that they also have a factory on site called Suncrest Diamonds. They deal with REAL diamonds. Jewelry stores send them real diamonds, and have them change their color. So the factory makes pink, purple, yellow, and just about any color of diamond. They alter the color by adding nitrogen in between the carbon atoms of the diamond and heating it up in a press like the one shown above. Cool huh!?





Check out more at: http://www.suncrestdiamonds.com/







Information taken from : http://www.ebearing.com/news2009/060901.htm