Circular Economy (CE) and the potential of reusing and recycling the products after the end of their life, becomes imperative for environmental, economic and social reasons. Especially during the 4th Industrial Revolution that is taking place nowadays, an increasing number of out-of-date equipment has to be replaced, which constitutes a chance and necessity to be reused, through recycling, redesigning and remanufacturing. The paper presents proof-of-concept studies regarding upcycling of obsolete and outdated equipment into novel test rigs mainly addressing research activities. Three such case studies are presented, namely the upcycling of an injection moulding machine into a modular test bench for power hydraulic components, the upcycling of scrap components into a hybrid hydraulic/ ICE powertrain rig and the functional augmentation of a gear roll tester to accommodate single and double flank tests. Significant savings in cost, raw materials and time are demonstrated in all cases and adherence to the CE objectives are observed.
This paper presents the design considerations, the kinematical simulation and the FE analysis of a differential mechanism which involves the rolling contact of two cam-track disks with four equally-spaced spherical rollers sliding in a cage much resembling a rolling bearing. The obvious benefit of this concept in the field of power transmissions is the potential replacement of gears in planetary reducers and differentials by cams. The side gears of a conventional open differential are replaced by two identical cam-track disks, while the spider gears are replaced by rolling elements that is, balls, cylinders or tapered cylinders. Practically, the well-known rolling bearing concept is generalized, where the circular tracks are replaced by wavy curves. In order to assess the performance of the mechanism, the shape of the tracks is considered for two distinct cases and a rigorous mathematical modeling follows regarding the kinematics of the mechanism. The results were validated through kinematical simulations and FE analysis was carried out coupled with fatigue life computation for a typical passenger vehicle differential, indicating that service life in the order of 200,000 km is feasible.
Quasi-static modelling of non-conjugate contact of tooth-modified spur and helical gears has been studied at length, but existing models are hindered by convergence problems and require a brute-force numerical approach. Here, a novel, computationally efficient, and stable and unconditionally convergent model is developed for non-conjugate tooth contact in three dimensions and applied to crowned spur and helical gears to assess parametrically the sensitivity of various in- and out-of-plane misalignments on the path of contact, transmission error, and contact pressure. Performance metrics are defined, and comparisons are made between three different crowning modification functions.
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