Electric motors are the primary driving equipment in any plant and extremely critical to ensure uninterrupted productivity. However, the high vibration, thermal cycling and expected long service life can be challenging for these critical components.

There are a few very common challenges related to, for example, threaded fasteners on an electric motor.

The root causes of these failures are in their essence quite simple: vibration, torque and thermal fluctuations and corrosion. And all these failures can really be traced back to one thing – the gap remaining between the threads of the bolt and nut. Usually you don’t even think about how much metal to metal contact is there really between a nut and a bolt. And the fact that it’s only 15%, will shock most people. The remaining 85% is just gap. And this gap allows for a few unwanted things:

• Vibration to cause side-to-side motion leading to self-loosening
• Differential expansion and contraction of substrates due to service temperature changes
• Corrosive environment to attack the metal fasteners

Conventional locking methods like lock washers, while providing some level of maintained torque for a period of time, do not close this gap and prove ineffective in locking and sealing threaded assemblies. A liquid threadlocker, on the other hand, addresses this issue exactly.

On a typical electric motor, you’ll likely need two products: Loctite 222, for small diameter and long engagement length bolts, like the motor through bolts, and Loctite 243 for all other bolts.

As a result, what these two products do for you is the following:

In case you’d like to learn more about threadlocking on electric motors specifically, keep an eye out for a webinar on this topic, or simply contact us directly and we’ll be happy to talk about your specific requirements.