What exactly is an electric motor bearing and what exactly does EMQ mean?

The term is widely used to denote bearings of lower than standard noise level for electric motor or other noise critical applications but how do you know how quiet the electric motor bearings really are and how they compare to other electric motor bearings or indeed other well known brands? We could quote specific noise levels but these can be measured in either Anderons or decibels so that may not help, particularly if you don't have the same information for the brand that works for you. This means that the term "EMQ" is fairly meaningless on its own.

We needed to demonstrate that our electric motor bearings would stand up well against recognised quality brands for noise and vibration. We decided to have our electric motor bearings independently tested against two other brands. There are a number of quality bearing manufacturers out there so we picked two of the best, SKF and NSK-RHP. These manufacturers are known for the quality and consistency of their products. We used new bearings, purchased from authorised distributors to give a fair comparison. We should stress that both manufacturers will offer extra low noise versions of their bearings but, due to the quality of their product, the standard bearings are successfully used in low noise applications throughout the world.

The tables below give the results of independent noise tests carried out on our behalf, comparing EMQ, EMQ2 and EMQ3 grade with the SKF and NSK-RHP bearings.