TechArchive

Original article date: January 2000

Alan Quinn reviews Flender Power Transmission’s new technical handbook. Will it become an industry benchmark?

Covering a wide variety of calculations and useful data through 12 sections running over 150 detailed pages, the Flender Power Transmission technical handbook has a place on any design engineer’s bookshelf.

The pages cover almost any topic which a designer of power transmission is likely to need. There are sections on SI units, maths, physics and geometry and the mechanical properties of materials – surprisingly extensive in scope. These are in addition to the more predictable sections on the geometry and load-carrying capacities of involute gears and the properties of cylindrical gear units, shaft couplings and vibration – a highly mathematical treatment listing formulae for the calculation of stiffness and thereby of vibrations.

Flender’s extensive product range includes geared motors and gear units, as well as couplings and clutches, electronics and special design geared motors.

Indeed, Flender might have done itself a slight disservice in that because the handbook attempts to cover such a wide range of topics, the coverage of the company’s own products is actually briefer than you might have expected!

Technical merits

Another minor criticism is that there is also a commercial price to pay in the introductory 16-page colour section – in fact, the only colour section in the publication – which provides all the corporate information, which seems rather out of place in a publication which is otherwise so comprehensive in its technical content. Maybe more space devoted instead to worked examples might have earned the company more credit.

Those criticisms aside, there is no doubt that the handbook will find a place on many shelves – including my own, as a likely source of those elusive formulae and engineering facts which should be on the tip of one’s tongue but never seem to be! An example of this is the set of tables on explosion protection of electrical switchgear.

Highlight of the handbook for this non-practising engineer is from the heart of the company’s core material and covers the geometry of involute gears. The section contains two tables of the most important formulae used for the determination of sizes of a cylindrical gear and a cylindrical gear pair, and this for both internal and external gear pairs. A further table lists the derived quantities which are used in the calculation of load carrying capacity.

• Flender Power Transmission

January 2000