This article is sourced from our coupling supplier Altra Motion and was written by Joseph L. Hazelton.
To maintain machinery, planned downtime is necessary. To fix broken equipment, unplanned downtime is excruciating, especially when your factory is running closer and closer to capacity.
Now, the effort to reduce downtime, planned and unplanned, is ongoing in industry. However, in that effort, some companies are paying more and more attention today to the couplings on their drivelines. This tendancy has been noticed by some manufacturers of couplings.
And what’s being done with couplings to reduce downtime?
In heavy industry- that is, in heavy-duty, high-speed applications- two trends are:
1) to remove a type of coupling and replace it with another type.
2) to reduce a coupling’s weight in order to reduce possible imbalance.