Gearboxes

Man, endowed with an incomparable potential for imagination, has always sought to build tools to compensate for his own shortcomings and relieve his suffering. Thus, with obstinacy, he has tried to use, with maximum efficiency, what Nature has placed at his disposal to carry out operations that his physical possibilities alone could not allow.

For example, to move a large stone, he invented the lever, then the rollers, the capstan, etc., in other words, mechanical transformers that put the primary force at his disposal - that of his arms or domesticated animals, etc. - into a useful form.

Later, the power of wind and waterfall was discovered, and this naturally led to the invention of a gearing system - admittedly primitive, but necessary to adapt the speed of rotation of the wings or the mill wheel to that of the grinding wheel.

The last two centuries have seen an explosion with the birth of the engine: steam engine, electric motor, internal combustion engine, gas turbine, etc., all increasingly powerful, compact and durable. But this power would be nothing if it weren't put to work for the receiver: the useful instrument. And in this field, there is no limit to the creative imagination, as mankind is offered ever more efficient products in every field: agriculture, machine tools, lifting, transport, servomechanism, etc.

So, in almost all cases, the motor delivers its power to a shaft, i.e. in rotary form, which can be written as :

As far as the receiver is concerned, it is very rare for it to be able to use this power in its primary form, hence the creation of a linking element, an energy transformer, which will ensure that the motor is well adapted to the receiver throughout its range of use.

So it's been with this trilogy of motor-transformer-receiver ever since man first began to work mechanically, from the lever that needed a stone as a fulcrum, through the first primitive wooden gearboxes used on windmills, to the sophisticated gearboxes used in tractors, trucks and cars, with manual or automatic control, while awaiting the large-scale advent of continuous torque transformation, and thus the ideal match between the motor's operating conditions and those of the receiver it is intended to drive. We have thus given a very general overview of the role of this transformer, more commonly known, depending on the application, as: a single-ratio gearbox, multiplier or relay box, used in fixed installations, or a gearbox used when the receiver has a variety of functional conditions, as found in transport or machine tools....