Gear Technology Magazine
www.geartechnology.com/articles/23722

Transmission Analysis Added to RomaxDesigner

July 15, 2010

Design engineers are increasingly presented with more challenging scenarios, especially given automotive industry trends towards more efficient, quieter and higher performing vehicles. The need for confidence in simulation technology has never been greater. With Romax’s latest release of RomaxDesigner R12.7, we deliver such confidence by offering a more in depth level of analysis than ever before. The new edition includes new advanced capabilities such as accounting for thermal expansion, test duty cycles, improved NVH gear whine analysis, and gear root stress prediction as well as many other features and improvements.

When designing transmissions, thermal expansion is a major factor and users can now account for this when using RomaxDesigner. RomaxDesigner now calculates the thermal expansion for all components, enabling users to visualize how this affects the whole system at the same time as considering clearances, deflections and preloads. This new capability considers the thermal expansion of shafts and bearings, as well as housings, planet carriers, and other imported finite element components.

Testing of transmissions is an essential part of the design process, and with RomaxDesigner’s new capability for test duty cycle generation, users benefit from massively reduced rig testing times. RomaxDesigner now generates a test duty cycle from road load data with condensed damages. This matches for both gear contact, gear bending and bearing damages within one single duty cycle, thereby reducing the need for additional testing time.

RomaxDesigner can now perform a root stress analysis, predicting root stress due to gear mesh loads and system deflections. A critical gear performance parameter, users can now calculate this in RomaxDesigner, without having to resort to time-consuming and specialized FE analysis. As the demand for NVH technology grows, Romax have improved the usability and robustness of all RomaxDesigner NVH functions increasing the ease of use for customers. Another enhancement is the improved third party links and development into time domain based analysis software such as ANSYS and integration to other dynamic analysis packages.