Freudenberg seal helps firm gain ground

PLYMOUTH, Mich.—Freudenberg Sealing Technologies has gained significant ground in the mobile machinery market with its most advanced cassette seal.

A global sealing technology expert and member of the Weinheim, Germany-headquartered Freudenberg Group, the company recently landed a contract to supply its most advanced Cassette-S4 seal to a major global manufacturer of agricultural, construction and forestry machinery. The seal will be installed on rear axles of the customer's newest row crop tractor platforms.

But what began as a long, team-oriented effort on the part of Freudenberg to solve serious issues one customer faced has turned into a product the company believes will solve issues in other parts of the mobile machinery industry—so much so that the firm is not only producing the product in Europe, but it intends to manufacture the cassette seal in the U.S. in the not-too-distant future.

According to Jens Wolfram, Freudenberg Sealing Technologies' segment director for the general industry, the advanced seal offers mobile machinery customers state-of-the-art dirt protection, material durability and seal longevity under the toughest environmental conditions.

Project launch

Development of the Cassette-S4 began about 10 years ago, he said, and initially involved a team of product engineers and sales managers at Freudenberg's lead cassette seals manufacturing plant in Luserna, Italy.

While in the beginning the seal was developed with only one customer in mind, like most seals there's always a start, and then development often branches out to include uses in other industries, Wolfram said. That's what happened in the case of the Cassette-S4.

"It's a pretty versatile seal," he said, and in addition to the agriculture industry, it can be used on construction, forestry and possibly other machinery.

Freudenberg has continued to manufacture the seal in Luserna, Wolfram said, where production of the product has been significantly increased to meet new demands.

He said the company has plans in the works to roll the cassette seal out for production within the next 18 months to two years at the firm's Northfield, N.H., facility, operated by Plymouth-based Freudenberg-NOK Sealing Technologies, which runs the business operations for Freudenberg Sealing Technologies in the Americas and operates 20 plants in the region.

Wolfram said that work on the Cassette-S4 represents the impact that Freudenberg's collaboration with customers can have on the development of advanced industrial technology.

A decades-long partnership between the company and the mobile machinery customer led to an open discussion on tractor warranty issues, an agreement to analyze future data, a look at product alternatives and eventually the design and engineering of a multi-functional seal that is safer and easier to install, Wolfram said.

Giorgio Gucco, global technical director at the Luserna facility, said that in 2011 when supplying Freudenberg's Cassette-S3 model of the seal, some customers were still experiencing warranty issues.

"Farmers working in fields where water and mud were a constant issue, like rice fields, needed a higher level of axle sealing to prevent contamination and oil leaks in the wheel hub," he said. "These leaks were costly, time consuming and a source of customer dissatisfaction. In that sense, they were expensive."

Creating solutions

By tracking the customer's warranty and failure analysis data, according to Wolfram, Freudenberg's engineers discovered two issues: the need to provide better assistance in teaching the customer's plant personnel how to properly install cassette seals and, more significantly, the double lip design of the Cassette-S3, while sealing against dirt ingress in tractor wheel hubs in most applications, did not hold up to exposure in wet, muddy conditions.

To remedy the proper installation problem, he said an extended trip to the customer's manufacturing facility helped resolve the challenge.

Taking care of the second issue required a new design of the cassette seal that would take the sealing function and contamination protection of the seal to a more robust level, Wolfram said.

Freudenberg's sales managers and engineers eventually settled on a complex, three-component design that protects all functional parts—the sealing lips, the optimized working surface, dirt exclusion lips, dedicated counter-surfaces and internal lubrication—inside a closed design, he said.

And the Cassette-S4 became a reality.

It guarantees safer installation, eliminates the need to install additional sealing components and likely will improve component longevity, Wolfram said.

Extensive field testing of the Cassette-S4 over a two-year period "confirmed Freudenberg's bench test results that the Cassette-S4 lasted four times longer in harsh agricultural conditions than its predecessor," he said.

"The results exceeded the customer's expectations," Wolfram said, and the Cassette-S4 ultimately was selected because of its longevity and performance, although the customer did evaluate other companies' axle sealing solutions.

Demand for row crop tractors is high throughout the world, said Dave Burgess, the company's senior sales director. Freudenberg is focused on product quality, he said, and the firm's engineers have been locked in on improving it.

Because Freudenberg's customer also is completely focused on product quality, he said, "this program brought us together, allowing us to demonstrate our sealing expertise, and provided a solution that has wide application to a lot of tough environmental challenges."