"The beauty of the reducer is that it's so huge," says Dragos Oprescu, a principle applications engineer for Timken who clearly enjoys working with really big mechanical stuff. He's referring to the 40-ton speed reducer on one of the Eiffel Tower's seven elevators, which was installed in 1965 and engineers rebuilt in 2004. The heavy worm gear (36 metric tons), manufactured by the CMD Company, achieves a speed reduction of 13:1 between the intermediate and output shaft operating at 14 rpm. Oprescu was part of a Timken engineering team in Colmar, France, that was responsible for analyzing the six original bearings on the reducer's pulleys and output shaft (they were found to be in excellent operating condition), and specifying new parts. They replaced the 35-inch-diameter tapered bearings with nearly the exact same design, save for material and other design improvements that may help see the new bearings through the next 40 years and beyond. An advantage of the tapered bearing design in this application, says Eric Schumacher, Timken sales engineer, is its capacity to accommodate both axial and radial loads and the avoidance of slipping speeds between the bearing race and its inner ring—resulting in lower energy losses.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
Andrew Morris designed a circuit that could detect a stroke victim's groan and convert the sound into a signal so caregivers would know when help was needed.
New disc magnet motors fit into the design trend of stepping up to closed loop performance while maintaining the cost advantage of stepper motor technology.
At the Design News webinar on June 27, learn all about aluminum extrusion: designing the right shape so it costs the least, is simplest to manufacture, and best fits the application's structural requirements.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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