Announcing the Romax 2021.1 Release
Building on the 2021 release available in July of this year, we are pleased to announce the 2021.1 release of the Romax software suite: Concept, Enduro, Spectrum, Spin, Energy, Evolve.
The new developments in this release cover a range of solution areas across all of our six core products, with key highlights including:
Improved specification and analysis of “as manufactured” roller and raceway profiles
As part of the design and manufacture of bearing rollers and raceways, there is a requirement to modify their nominal cylindrical, conical, or spherical profile. The purpose is to avoid edge stresses that arise if the contacting surfaces are unmodified. Any edge loading may be further exaggerated when there is a misalignment between the inner and outer raceway.
Romax Spin allows users to optimize the roller and raceway profiles to perfectly suit the bearing application and loading conditions and therefore minimize contact stress and extend the bearing life. This is achieved using several different profile modification types including the theoretically ideal logarithmic profile. However, for practicality and minimizing cost, bearing suppliers often choose to manufacture an approximation to the ideal profile by combining a series of simpler and easier to produce circular arc profiles.
Working closely with some of our bearing customers, the Romax team has implemented a new feature to allow users to model and analyse bearings using the same multiple arc-crowned roller and raceway profiles that they use in the manufacturing process. This implementation ensures the Romax bearing geometry matches the manufactured geometry, therefore considering more accurate geometry in the calculation of bearing stiffness, contact stress, and other results.
The development includes the ability to automatically fit the arc parameters to approximate the ideal logarithmic profile and the functionality is integrated into the Parametric Study and Batch Running features allowing complete flexibility to innovate. This development better aligns Romax Spin with bearing industry design and manufacturing practices and is integrated with the powerful advanced bearing contact models.
Additional cylindrical gear tolerances and integration of these into the cylindrical gear grinding simulation
In the 2021 release, embedding technology from Dontyne Systems into Romax Enduro kick-started us on a mission to bring gear design and manufacture closer together. In this release, we have taken a further step and extended the cylindrical gear tolerances that can be specified and the related core capabilities. We have also integrated these tolerances with the embedded Dontyne capability for cylindrical gear grinding simulation to offer additional insight.
The new tolerances augment the existing Tolerance Experiment functionality enabling gear designers to study any combination of tolerances related to the gear pre-finishing and finishing processes and other gear parameters. Users can now easily obtain a report of all key geometry and rating parameters for any given tolerance condition and create even more robust gear designs.
With the tolerances also now being passed into the cylindrical gear grinding simulation, users can use the Manual read-only mode and bring up the user interface of the embedded version of Dontyne’s helical gear manufacture simulation and visualize and export the gear and tooling profiles in different tolerance conditions. This provides an interactive visual aid to the gear designer and allows them to study the profile variations with gear face width due to the micro-geometry modifications.
Variability is inherent to all manufacturing. With this new feature, we are giving users more tools to account for this when designing gears with Romax software so that designs can be made robust and manufacturable as early as possible in the product development process.
Detailed 3D spline geometry CAD export and 2D profile plots
A new ‘high detail’ option is now available when exporting an assembly that contains a spline via CAD Fusion. The resulting CAD geometry is a full representation of the spline component from the Romax model, better suited for illustration, display, drawings, and further CAD modelling compared to the previously available CAD export capability. Another part of this development was to enable Romax users to visually check spline profiles in a new 2D Plot tab, export the 2D coordinates of the spline’s macro-geometry, and to enable the export of spline ‘cookie cutters’.
In addition to these headline developments, there are a large number of enhancements that existing users will appreciate, including: improved journal bearing functionality, updated bearing reports with increased consistency and clarity, improved root stress reporting, and new parametric study variables. Furthermore, an overhaul of the user interface for efficiency analysis settings offers improved usability and enables mixing and matching of loss models for different bearing types. There are also improvements that have been made to the electric machine workflows and the specification of harmonics in the electric machine excitation pre-processor.
For more information, read the release notes on our support portal or get in touch with our experts today.