What’s the difference between bearing steel and carbon steel ?

What is bearing steel & carbon steel?

Bearing steel:

Bearing steel is used in producing ball bearing, roller bearing ring, Bearing steel has high and steady hardness and wear resistance. High elastic limitation.

Bearing steel is divided in the hardening type bearing steel, surface hardening type bearing steel, high temperature stainless bearing steel, bearing steel etc.

Bearing steel is all steel production in one of the most demanding steel grade.

Bearing steel( Another name is high carbon chromium steel): Omega c is approximately 1%, the carbon content of chromium content is cr omega is 0.5%-1.65%.

The physical properties of the bearing steel mainly to check the decarburization layer, non-metallic inclusion,microstructure, macrostructure.

Delivery condition: hot rolled annealing or cold drawn annealing

Carbon Steel:

Carbon steel is the carbon content less than 1.35% (0.1% 1.2%), in addition to iron, carbon and within limits of silicon, manganese, phosphorus, sulfur and other impurities, excluding other alloying elements of steel.Carbon steel depends mainly on the performance of carbon content.Higher carbon content increasing, the strength of steel, hardness, plasticity, toughness and weldability.Compared with other steel, carbon steel using the earliest, low cost, wide range of performance, and the consumption is the largest.

There is overlap between bearing steel & carbon steel, but they can’t be separated completely. Generally, the main difference is that carbon steel in addition to the impurities, excluding other alloying elements, but bearing steel included some alloy element,also these alloy elements are necessary to bearing steel.

How to distiguish bearing steel & carbon steel?

Bearing steel : higher strength and higher hardness.Bearing steel not only used for manufacturing rolling bearing of abll bearing, roller and sleeve, but also used for production measuring tool, cold stamping dies, machine screw, eg punching die, measuring tool, tap and diesel engine oil pump precision matching parts etc.

Carbon steel : Lower strength and lower hardness. Carbon steel included Carbon structural steel, high quality carbon structural steel, carbon tool steel, cast steel. They are used in engineering structure and general machinery parts.

What is advantage and disadvantage between them?

1. Different service life. bearing steel service life is longer.

2. Different wear-resisting performance.Bearing steel wearing-resisting performance is better than carbon steel .

3. Different technology and effection.

4. Different performance. Bearing steel with high elastic. Carbon steel with good processing manufaturability and improve performance.

No matter what will you  choose? eg :bearing steel or carbon steel, according to producing to choose what you need, if you don't know how to choose, please contact with us. We will give suitable advice.