Gearmotor Designed to Produce High Torque

Gear Motor

A gear motor is a specific type of electrical motor that is designed to produce high torque while maintaining a low horsepower, or low speed, motor output. Many different applications, including devices in your home use gear motors. Many devices such as can openers, garage door openers, washing machine time control knobs, and even electric alarm clocks use gear motors. Common commercial applications of a gear motor include hospital beds, industrial equipment, and aerators.

One of the most widely used gear motors is bevel gears. Bevel gears are gears where the axes of the two shafts intersect and the tooth-bearing faces of the gears themselves are conically shaped. Bevel gears often mounts on shafts that are 90 degrees apart, but can work at other angles as well. The pitch surface of bevel gears is a cone.

In the case of an aerator, the bevel gears helps dissolves oxygen into pond water through the high-speed impeller of the submersible motor. It produces many tiny oxygen bubbles when the impeller infuses a mix of oxygen and water. It disperses the oxygen bubbles through the body of the water quickly and purifies the water.

The bevel gear also has many diverse applications such as locomotives, marine applications, automobiles, printing presses, cooling towers, power plants, steel plants, railway track inspection machines, etc.

Types of Bevel Gears
Different types of bevel gears classified according to geometry:

1. Straight bevel gears have conical pitch surface and teeth are straight and tapering towards apex.
2. Spiral bevel gears have curved teeth at an angle allowing tooth contact to be gradual and smooth.
3. Zerol bevel gears are very similar to a bevel gear only exception is the teeth are curved: the ends of each tooth are coplanar with the axis, but the middle of each tooth is swept circumferentially around the gear. Think of Zerol bevel gears as spiral bevel gears, which also have curved teeth, but with a spiral angle of zero, so the ends of the teeth align with the axis.
4. Hypoid bevel gears are similar to spiral bevel but the pitch surfaces are hyperbolic and not conical. Pinion can be offset above, or below, the gear centre, thus allowing larger pinion diameter, and longer life and smoother mesh, with additional ratios e.g., 6:1, 8:1, 10:1. In a limiting case of making the “bevel” surface parallel with the axis of rotation, this configuration resembles a worm drive. Hypoid gears were widely used in automobile rear axles.

Straight bevel gears are the most common and the simplest type of bevel gear. They have straight teeth and resemble a spur gear, except that they are conical rather than cylindrical.

Advantages and Disadvantages
Bevel gear makes it possible to change the operating angle. The difference of the number of teeth (effectively diameter) on each wheel allows mechanical advantage to be changed. Increasing or decreasing the ratio of teeth between the drive and driven wheels will change the ratio of rotations between the two. It means that the rotational drive and torque of the second wheel will change in relation to the first: (1) increasing speed and decreasing torque, or (2) decreasing speed and increasing torque.

The disadvantage of bevel gear is that one of its wheels only works exclusively with its complementary wheel and no other. It must also be precisely mounted. Carefully measurement on the shafts’ bearings must also be calculated to support significant forces.

Bevel gear can also be used to reduce motor speed for specific purposes, often called speed reducer gearbox. This is a mechanical speed reduction equipment used in automation control systems.

Speed reducer gearbox generally serves two purposes. Its primary use is to multiply the amount of torque generated by an input power source to increase the amount of usable work while reducing the speed of a prime mover output shaft. The output shaft of a gearbox rotates at a slower rate than the input shaft, and this reduction in speed produces a mechanical advantage, increasing torque. A gearbox can be set up to do the opposite and provide an increase in shaft speed with a reduction of torque.

For the best quality, precise manufacturing and durability, contact Mectron for more information on the right gear motor that works for you.