Page 66: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (November 2024)

TECH FEATURE © druid007/AdobeStock

REDUCING COMPLEXITY IN MARINE

WINCHES WITH POWERTRAIN SOLUTIONS

By Jesse Dupuis, Director of Powertrain Product Management, Regal Rexnord winch needed to meet the torque and speed requirements to

The Challenge:

An international engineering technology company that have enough torque development to control, retrieve, and lift strives to develop unique, innovative, sustainable products the ROVs, while also having dynamic braking to both let out more line for the ROVs and hold the brake to lock the line. for their customers needed assistance with designing a ma-

The Powertrain Solutions team partnered with the engineer- rine winch, which is a critical component in the marine in- dustry. This component is used for the control, lifting, and ing technology company to come up with a design that sig- retrieval of remote operated vehicles (ROVs) on sea/ocean ni? cantly reduced the complexity, cost, and weight of their original concept, while increasing its robustness. The com- fairing vessels.

plexity was reduced by 58% by eliminating seven compo-

The winch needed to lift a type of ROV called a hull cleaner, nents, such as the synchronous belt, sheaves, belt guard, and which is designed to remove fouling on the ship hull. This re- ? ange mounted bearing, and by combining the motor, brake, duces the risk of transporting biological contamination across and encoder into one Kollmorgen™ servo motor. different zones, and improves fuel ef? ciency on the ship.

The company discovered they could not ? nd a winch solu-

The Results: tion that met all their objectives on their own. They had an ini-

In addition to reducing complexity, these changes reduced tial concept in mind but wanted help reducing its complexity the cost of the entire winch system by 32% and its weight and potential maintenance. By partnering with the Powertrain by 13%. Reliability and ef? ciency also improved by 3% and

Solutions team at Regal Rexnord, they were able to eliminate components from their original concept, while meeting the maintenance was reduced by removing the synchronous belt and sheaves, as they have a hard time standing up to the ex- tough demands of a seafaring application.

posed saltwater environment. The Kollmorgen servo motor and drive with resistive load bank allows the customer to dy-

The Solution: namically brake by dumping power to the resistor bank and

There were both physical and functional challenges to keep hold statically via an integrated holding brake inside the mo- in mind when designing the marine winch. The physical needs of the winch were high corrosion resistance in the harsh salt tor. Multiplying the motor braking through the gearbox ratio spray environment, a simpli? ed design to minimize potential allowed a much smaller braking solution than the initial drum winder shaft-mounted brake that the customer used, resulting failures and maintenance, and ensuring it was small enough to ? t the limited enclosure size on the vessel. Functionally, the in a signi? cant cost reduction. 66 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • November 2024

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