Reliable, User-Friendly Planetary Gear Unit Design
Stober Relies on FVA Workbench for Drive Verification
Stöber Antriebstechnik GmbH + Co. KG rely on the FVA-Workbench for dimensioning and verification of their drives. The calculation and simulation software allows Stöber engineers to develop their innovative gear unit solutions more quickly and efficiently. The result: higher quality products.
Stöber uses the FVA-Workbench for dimensioning and verification of their standard gear units as well as customized applications and special gear units. A wide range of design objectives are considered, such as load capacity, excitation of vibrations, power loss, and efficiency. Designing modular planetary gear units involves the planetary gear unit stages of an entire series, consisting of different dimensions and gear ratios. With the FVA-Workbench’s integrated scripting feature, these tasks can be implemented quickly and without special programming knowledge. Thus, countless calculations can be carried out, that would be very time-consuming without suitable software.

Scripting Makes it Easy to Perform Mass Calculations
For the design of planetary gears, Stöber’s engineers first consider the macrogeometry taking various restrictions into account, such as installation space, manufacturing, and cost-effectiveness. Characteristics such as load capacity, power loss, or vibration are largely influenced by the gearing geometry. This development step is crucial for the excellent operating characteristics of Stöber drives. Customer-specific requirements can also easily be included in the design.

The possibility of performing mass calculations during gear unit design helps engineers to determine perfect gear unit solutions. In the FVA-Workbench, the integrated scripting feature is used to perform mass calculations. In a preparatory step, the parameters to be varied (such as the helix angle, module, center distance, profile offset, and load information) are pre-defined in an Excel spreadsheet. The script then prepares a calculation plan and executes the mass calculations for each variant one-by-one. Scripting uses a pre-defined FVA-Workbench model, which is manipulated for each respective variant calculation. This way, several thousand variants can be calculated automatically within a very short time. The FVA-Workbench’s excellent HTML-based reporting feature is used to evaluate the calculations. This format allows the engineer to select the results to be evaluated. The data can also be visualized and saved. Time-consuming searching through overflowing PDF files is no longer necessary. The scripting feature also makes it easy to export results to Excel for further evaluation.