Through both our expert simulation platform and our engineering analysts we are able to provide you with a unique understanding of how and why your system behaves in the way it does.
Modelling and analysing system interactions are core strengths of Romax and we excel at understanding gear and bearing interactions, planetary systems, housing deflections, shaft deflections, and their relationship with each other.
Application
The versatility and depth of our modelling and analysis capability means that our services can be integrated into two crucial areas of the product life-cycle:
New design
Modelling and analysis is a powerful tool when used up-front in the design cycle. For designers and manufacturers our techniques can provide insight into component and system behaviours before reaching prototype – encouraging intelligent robust design and reducing time and cost.
Existing products
Predicting and resolving mechanical issues within the wind turbine drivetrain enables wind farm operators to achieve optimum electricity production. Romax applies its analysis and modelling techniques to existing turbines to identify system faults and accurately predict system behaviours and to actual failures in the form of forensic analysis, either on or offsite.
Component & system modelling & analysis
A drivetrain is more than a series of independent components put together. It is a system that must work together in harmony, with components designed to account for each others strengths and weaknesses. By modelling the drivetrain as a complete system, Romax can account for linear and non-linear system effects giving you confidence in your design.
Gears
As well as calculating gearbox life and durability reports based on the loads and deflections of gears, Romax can accurately predict bending and contact stresses, mesh misalignments and meshing forces. Using our simulation platform RomaxWIND, we can display contact load distribution across the tooth face, contact temperature and micro-geometry analysis and provide specifications for custom materials.
With vast experience in planetary gear sets Romax understand the importance of equal load sharing between planetary gears, ensuring reliability and low vibration. By taking into account the effects of gravity, structure deflections, assembly and manufacturing tolerances, Romax offers a complete set of tools for predicting load sharing through each planet gear.
Bearings
Romax offers advanced non-linear analysis for all types of bearing and provide contact stresses, contact footprints and ellipse truncation predictions, misalignments and roller skew, load distribution across each rolling element and rib load calculation.
Our models can also be integrated into standard Finite Element (FE) analysis packages such as ANSYS to allow accurate modelling of large pitch and yaw wind turbine bearings.
For large advanced bearing analysis Romax can overcome many of the disadvantages of a conventional FE approach and save both time and cost.
Shafts
We systematically build models from the concept stage to the detailed design stage accounting for shaft deflections and system performance. In addition to standard shaft features, Romax can develop models with custom materials, improving the accuracy of stiffness predictions for system deflections.
Housings
Romax understands that loads exerted on the housing can cause it to deflect and impact on the misalignments of gears and bearings. Housing components can be imported into RomaxWIND in a number of native FE formats and then included in the system analysis to predict deflection and stress.
Our analysis process can take into account and assess:
- Bearing behaviour to identify excessive loads
- Minimise component loads or reduce misalignments to improve the system quality
- Predict load sharing within a fully flexible system instead of assuming load sharing factors
- Complex planetary gear sets and their behaviour
- All interacting components in a gearbox or drivetrain without sectioning
- Loads, deflections and interactions of all components
- Operating load and extreme load scenarios and their effects
- Material capabilities and manufacturing tolerances to ensure weight and cost reductions without compromising component life
Analysis graphs showing contact patterns from RomaxWIND software.
RomaxWIND – an integral analysis tool
Advanced analysis of bearings, gear design, gear optimisation, and sensitivity studies are just some of the capabilities available as part of the RomaxWIND virtual product development platform.
Housing influence, shaft fatigue analysis, micro-geometry influence and lubrication (plus others too numerous to mention) are also taken into account without the need for third party software, or interfaces to third party software.
All calculations can be conducted in one product development environment.
RomaxWIND offers you a quick and effective method of fine-tuning and performing further validation. Investigating the effect of bearing pre-load can be automatically analysed using the bearing pre-load tool, and minimising component damage through gear micro-geometry modifications is achievable through a completely automated design of experiments.
For further details see the RomaxWIND section of this website.