AN APPROACH TO EVALUATE THE MECHANICAL EFFICIENCY OF INDUCTION CHAIN DRIVE
This article is devoted to the development of methods and tools to evaluate the efficiency of an asynchronous electric chain drive in all possible modes of operation: high-speed, and load. The proposed method and tools allow you to determine the torque, the mechanical power, the moment of inertia, the acceleration and the efficiency of chain drives, as well as to evaluate their mechanical efficiency with a high frequency of signal registration, because the time can be used as a criterion for evaluating the efficiency of the chain drive in the process of acceleration of its system of rotating masses. The undeniable advantage of the developed methods and tools is no need to include strain gauge elements in the measurement system, which greatly affect the accuracy and speed of the measurement process. The new method requires a minimum amount of additional hardware and is therefore more cost-effective compared to existing methods. A possible drawback of this method is the use of bodies of rotation with reference moments of inertia, the value of which must exceed several times the value of the moment of inertia of the research object, which is difficult task at high weight and overall dimensions of a drive. Furthermore, fixing the body with the reference moment of inertia to the rear of the motor may cause poor tribological characteristics in induction motor bearing units, and hence distort the real pattern of operation of the chain drive. In further studies, the authors are invited to find ways to solve the identified problem. However, based on the results of experiments conducted in the present study, we can conclude that the developed method can be used to evaluate the efficiency of chain drives and can be used for research and monitoring of their technical condition. Finding the boundaries of permissible values of the drive characteristics, there is an opportunity to evaluate the residual life of research facilities in enterprises operating chains, and to determine the quality of manufactured products at manufacturing plants.