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Articles About environment
Companies around the world are learning to embrace the environment, and the gear industry is no exception. This special section takes a look at how some gear manufacturers are doing their part to conserve resources, preserve and protect the environment, and give back to the land. What we’ve found is that adopting environmental measures is far more than just good corporate citizenship. For many gear industry companies, good environmental practices also turn out to be good for the bottom line.
Environmentally friendly cutting fluids aren't just good for the environment. They can also be good for performance.
Not long ago, many manufacturing managers thought sensitivity to environmental protection standards meant additional expenses, decreased productivity, and a plethora of headaches and hassles.
Okay, so you want to make some high quality gears for your customers, and you want to make a profit for your company, but you don't want to make a mess of the environment. What can you do?
Heat treatment industry reinforces environmental/energy conservation.
Design Problem: Develop a gear drive for a pedal-powered water craft that will be easy to manufacture, use and maintain; that will be lightweight enough for the boat to be portable; and that will eliminate the environmental risk of lubricants leaking into the water.
One of the hot items on the public agenda these days is "The Environment." Suddenly everyone wants to save the whales and the rain forest. Politicians, rock stars, and big business have all discovered that you can't get anything but good press for saying that you're in favor of trees and marine mammals.
For environmental and economic reasons, the use of coolant in machining processes is increasingly being questioned. Rising coolant prices and disposal costs, as well as strains on workers and the environment, have fueled the debate. The use of coolant has given rise to a highly technical system for handling coolant in the machine (cooling, filtering) and protecting the environment (filter, oil-mist collector). In this area the latest cutting materials - used with or without coolant - have great potential for making the metal-removal process more economical. The natural progression to completely dry machining has decisive advantages for hobbing.
A main limiting factor in extending the use of hard coatings to machine component application is the lack of knowledge about how these inert coatings perform under lubricated conditions using today's lubricants.
Nondestructive examination (NDE) of ferrous and nonferrous materials has long proved an effective maintenance and anomaly characterization tool for many industries. Recent research has expanded its applicability to include the inspection of large, open gear drives. Difficulties inherent in other NDE methods make them time-consuming and labor-intensive. They also present the user with the environmental problem of the disposal of used oil. The eddy current method addresses these problems.
The trend toward moving coordinate measuring machines to the shop floor to become an integral part of the manufacturing operations brings real time process control within the reach of many companies. Putting measuring machines on the shop floor, however, subjects them to harsh environmental conditions. Like any measuring system, CMMs are sensitive to any ambient condition that deviates from the "perfect" conditions of the metrology lab.
The wind turbine industry has been plagued with gearbox failures, which cause repair costs, legal expenses, lost energy production and environmental pollution.
It used to be that a shop with hustle and plenty of big, fast machines could thrive using a manual system. But no more. Today's economic environment requires more and more in the way of topnotch service and quick turnaround - which frequently means a completely integrated shop floor control system.
Electroless Nickel (EN) plating, a process dating back to the 1940s, is one of the predominant metal finishing methods today. It is especially suitable for the gear industry, whose end uses span innumerable other industries, providing an endless assortment of requirements, environments, materials and specifications. EN plating has a broad array of functional features, which include:
Several trends in mechanical engineering are leading to greater surface stress on components and thus to unacceptable wear. These trends include greater stresses due to increased power densities; the need to maintain high precision of components throughout their service life; and the environmental imperative to reduce use of lubricants and additives.
Top Secret Code Name: Ginger Mission: Design, prototype and test a transmission for a new device. The transmission must be compact and efficient. It should have almost no backlash, and it must be able to operate in both forward and reverse. Most importantly, the transmission must be quiet. In fact, it shouldn't sound like a transmission at all. It should blend in with the environment and sound like music or the wind. This mission, should you choose to accept it, is top secret. Not even your employees can know what you're working on...
Why traditional lean manufacturing approaches need to be adapted for job shop environments.
Gearbox performance, reliability, total cost of ownership (energy cost), overall impact on the environment, and anticipation of additional future regulations are top-of-mind issues in the industry. Optimization of the bearing set can significantly improve gearbox performance.
This paper reviews the necessity for detailed specification, design and manufacture to achieve required performance in service. The precise definition of duty rating and a thorough understanding of the environmental conditions, whether it is in a marine or industrial application, is required to predict reliable performance of a gearbox through its service life. A case study relating to complex marine gears and other general practice is presented to review the techniques used by Allen Gears to design and develop a gearbox that integrates with the requirements of the whole machinery installation. Allen Gears has considerable experience in the design of a variety of industrial and marine gears(Ref. 1,2).
For a long time, relatively high noise levels have been generally accepted for industrial gear units in the 10-100 kW power range. However, due to changing environmental awareness - both in and around industrial sites - customers expectations have moved drastically towards low noise as a key differentiating factor.
The cutting tool industry has undergone some serious changes in the last couple of years in both technology and the way the industry does business. The emerging technology today, as well as for the foreseeable future, is dry cutting, especially in high volume production settings. Wet cutting continues to be as popular as ever with lubrication advances making it more economical and environmentally friendly. There has also developed a process called "near dry cutting." this process offers many of the benefits of fluids while eliminating many of hte associated problems.
Three years ago, coated gears seemed to be the perfect solution for the Micro Marine Corporation. The early designs for the gear drive of their MicroCAT human-powered boat used a combination of thin-film dry gear coatings with lubrication and wear-resistance properties. These coatings simplified their design, provided corrosion resistance, made the gear drive environmentally safe and eliminated the need for gear drive lubrication and maintenance. It was a success story in the making.
New innovations in the management of hear treating parts washers and yielding powerful, unexpected benefits. Simply, cost effective shop floor practices are being combined in new ways to deliver big quality improvements and significant help to the bottom line. Employing these steps early in the process can dramatically cut waste hauling expenses and greatly reduce environmental liabilities while continuously producing cleaner parts.
In the 1960's and early 1970's, considerable work was done to identify the various modes of damage that ended the lives of rolling element bearings. A simple summary of all the damage modes that could lead to failure is given in Table 1. In bearing applications that have insufficient or improper lubricant, or have contaminants (water, solid particles) or poor sealing, failure, such as excessive wear or vibration or corrosion, may occur, rather than contact fatigue. Usually other components in the overall system besides bearings also suffer. Over the years, builders of transmissions, axles, and gear boxes that comprise such systems have understood the need to improve the operating environment within such units, so that some system life improvements have taken place.
John P. Walter and Abby Dress analyze the challenges facing America's manufacturers to remain competitive in a global environment.
The NASA Lewis Research Center investigated the effect of tooth profile on the acoustic behavior of spur gears through experimental techniques. The tests were conducted by Cleveland State University (CSU) in NASA Lewis' spur gear testing apparatus. Acoustic intensity (AI) measurements of the apparatus were obtained using a Robotic Acoustic Intensity Measurement System (RAIMS). This system was developed by CSU for NASA to evaluate the usefulness of a highly automated acoustic intensity measurement tool in the reverberant environment of gear transmission test cells.
The October 2011 issue of Gear Technology featured the article “Low-Distortion Heat Treatment of Transmission Components,” which covered the combination of low-pressure carburizing and high pressure gas quenching in an automotive environment. Here, heat treating expert Dan Herring explains why oil quenching is an appropriate choice for many applications.
Minimizing gear losses caused by churning, windage and mesh friction is important if plant operating costs and environmental impact are to be minimized. This paper concentrates on mesh friction losses and associated scuffing risk. It describes the preliminary results from using a validated, 3-D Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Tooth Contact Analysis (TCA) program to optimize cylindrical gears for low friction losses without compromising transmission error (TE), noise and power density. Some case studies and generic procedures for minimizing losses are presented. Future development and further validation work is discussed.
In today’s manufacturing environment, shorter and more efficient product development has become the norm. It is therefore important to consider every detail of the development process, with a particular emphasis on design. For green machining of gears, the most productive and important process is hobbing. In order to analyze process design for this paper, a manufacturing simulation was developed capable of calculating chip geometries and process forces based on different models. As an important tool for manufacturing technology engineers, an economic feasibility analysis is implemented as well. The aim of this paper is to show how an efficient process design—as well as an efficient process—can be designed.
There are great advantages in dry hobbing, not only for friendliness toward the environment, but also for increasing productivity and for decreasing manufacturing cost. Dry hobbing, however, often causes failures in hob cutting edges or problems with the surface quality of gear tooth flanks. These difficulties are not present when hobbing with cutting oil. Pinching and crushing of generated chips between the hob cutting edge and the work gear tooth flank is considered a major cause of those problems.
Recent history has taught us that global competition has become tougher and is a major concern of American gear manufacturers from abroad have invaded American markets with products designed in an environment where management of technology has been practiced effectively. If American companies intend to compete in the changing world market, they must acquire the technologies that will allow them to do so.
This article deals with certain item to be taken into consideration for gear grinding, common problems that arise in gear grinding and their solutions. The discussion will be limited to jobbing or low-batch production environments, where experimental setup and testing is not possible for economic and other reasons.
In this issue of Gear Technology, we are focusing on using computers to their greatest advantage in gear design and manufacturing. In a sense, that's old news. It's a cliche to suggest that computers make our work life easier and more productive. No company that wishes to remain competitive in today's global manufacturing environment can afford to be without computers in all their manifestations. We need them in the office; we need them next to our desks in place of drafting boards; we need them on the shop floor.
This article discusses briefly some common manufacturing problems relating to coarse pitch gears and their suggested solutions. Most of the discussion will be limited to a low-quality production environment using universal machine tools.
8 Gear Technology advertisers will have booths at IMTS 92, the largest trade show in the Western Hemisphere. The show opens in Chicago on Sept. 9 and runs through the 17th. More than 800 companies from around the world will cover some 931,000 sq. ft. of exhibit space to show the latest manufacturing technology - everything from forming and fabrication products to environmental and plant safety equipment.
Dictatorships can be stifling. In an autocratic organization, employees seldom participate in decisions that affect them. By establishing a collaborative environment, you allow everyone to play a role in making your organization a success.
This article discusses an application driven approach to the computer-aided sizing of spur gear teeth. The methodology is bases on the index of tooth loading and environment of application of the gear. It employs handbook knowledge and empirical information to facilitate the design process for a novice. Results show that the approach is in agreement with the textbook data. However, this technique requires less expert knowledge to arrive at the conclusion. The methodology has been successfully implemented as a gear tooth sizing module of a parallel axis gear drive expert system.
An investigation of transmission errors and bearing contact of spur, helical, and spiral bevel gears was performed. Modified tooth surfaces for these gears have been proposed in order to absorb linear transmission errors caused by gear misalignment and to localize the bearing contact. Numerical examples for spur, helical, and spiral bevel gears are presented to illustrate the behavior of the modified gear surfaces with respect to misalignment and errors of assembly. The numerical results indicate that the modified surfaces will perform with a low level of transmission error in non-ideal operating environments.
The two reports referred to in this article, "The people wise Organization" and "House Divided: Views on Change from Top Management - and Their Employees," crossed our desks some weeks ago. They stimulated a fair amount of discussion here, and we hope they do the same in your offices. We welcome your responses. How do you view the corporate/competitive environment of the next few years? How do you see yourself and your company fitting in? Can these ideas work in the gear industry? Let us now what you think.
News Items About environment
1 SafeTap Plus Provides Safe and Clean Working Environment (February 13, 2008)
ITW Rocol recently unveiled a new water-based tapping fluid with a custom blend of synthetic additives that provide cooling properties wi... Read News
2 Hansen Opens Environmentally-Certified Plant (July 23, 2008)
After investing around 180 million euros, the expanded Hansen Transmissions Lommel, Belgium factory was officially opened by Flemish Min... Read News