Quote:
Originally Posted by Adrian Clark
Do you think you could elaborate on how FEA plays a role in your gearbox design process? Like what aspects of the gearbox do you use FEA to optimize?
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I definitely can! I’ll tackle the second question first. Generally I focus on using FEA on the components of my designs that I’m not sure will be able to take the loads I’ve ballparked. For example, basically all FEA I preformed this year was to analyze whether or not the output shaft in this gearbox and the near identical one in our winch would fail/plastically deform/elastically deform to the point of not functioning correctly.
If I feel like something I’ve designed is risky, I definitely take that part (and system) into an FEA simulation. Since build obviously isn’t infinitely long, I make sure that I only take a small portion of the gearbox into FEA and leave everything in an unoptimized state.
For example, I could have taken much more material off the gearbox plates and made the gearbox *much* lighter/smaller through a couple other changes too, however I left the plates thicker and did not makes these changes cause I knew they would just work as is and this reduced the time needed to design our gearbox. (The plates would have looked a lot more 254 esk, more air than plate.)
Another point of note is that I’ve never had anything close to formal training on how to use FEA to analyze designs, so I always take my results with a mound of salt and run many many tests just to verify that my initial results actually make sense. (I do this mostly because I know how easy it is to mess up an FEA sim and if you just use the results without thinking you can fool yourself into thinking a design will work when it will fail, or the complete opposite.)
I hope this answered your question!
