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Flender Drive Assemblies for China

Flender Power Transmission is supplying four drive assemblies to a coal export terminal at Port of Tianjin, China.

The drive assemblies are for two railcar dumpers at the plant, each of which empties the contents of two coal wagons every two minutes on an automated line, at a rate of 3840 tonnes per hour. The drive assemblies will help provide a total unloading capability of 20 million tonnes of coal per year.

Each railcar dumper system consists of a dumper (two drives), indexer (six drives) and charger (two drives). Each dumper drive assembly comprises a 90kW motor with twin input disc brake arrangement, H3SH size 10 Flender FZG gear unit with steel housing, and ZAPEX Cardan spacer shaft coupling with disc brake. All are mounted on a baseplate. Additionally, a pinion shaft is mounted in pedestal bearings on a separate adjustable slide base.

The pinions drive semi-circular girth gears to actuate tipping, rotating each railcar through 160° and returning it back to the starting position. Each drive assembly feature three brakes, required to arrest rotation in the event of an emergency stop.

Flender is also supplying 16 Planurex planetary gear units for the indexers and chargers on the same railcar dumper system. The indexers move the train forward, two cars at a time. The two lead cars are uncoupled and the charger then moves these lead cars on to the dumper platform. The Flender units comprise 90kW motors, Autogard torque limiting couplings, multi-disc brakes, P2NA size 10 gear units and output pinions. By moving the train along wagon by wagon, the process enables a high degree of automation and is a high integrity, high throughput system.

Flender won the order from Bristol based customer Strachan & Henshaw's bulk materials handling division, which recently became part of Swedish company Svedala. Svedala project manager Dave Hicken commented on the Flender units:

"We have designed a highly automated process that maximises the efficient throughput of coal. Flender technology has been an integral part of this and the reliability of their products was certainly a deciding factor."

E-mail :nick.garthwaite@siemens.com