From Theory to Practice
SKF principal scientist Guillermo Morales-Espejel shares the defining points of his career thus far, including creating a transformative approach to bearing life prediction which holds significant value for design engineers, equipment manufacturers, and end users alike.

Why do machines fail? It's a fundamental question that has fascinated Guillermo Morales throughout a career that has taken him halfway around the world, to the highest levels of technical research and down into the minutiae of microscopic imperfections.
A Mexican/French national, now based at SKF's Research and Technology Development Centre in the Netherlands, Morales divides his time between overseeing industrial R&D projects and holding senior academic positions at the University of Lyon (INSA) and Imperial College London. He has made numerous contributions to the science of rotating machinery. One of the most significant has been his work on new ways to predict the operating life of rolling bearings under real-world conditions.
"You can design many mechanical components by just calculating stresses and making sure you do not exceed the fatigue limit. In this way you do not have to worry about fatigue, it will not happen” Morales says. "In bearings, the duty cycles are so long and the stresses are so high that you almost always get fatigue. You need a mathematical formulation to understand these stresses and their effect on component life.”
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