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Your benefits with special gear units from SEW-EURODRIVE

High quality and reliability
thanks to the high degree of in-house added value and many years of experience from numerous realised projects.

Everything from a single source
from standard gear units, special gear units and motors to frequency inverters, couplings, brakes and much more

Short delivery times
thanks to in-house production of special gearboxes and optimised processes

Safety for the user
thanks to our worldwide service network for drive technology

Flexible special gearboxes for tough requirements

Drive solutions for general industrial processes such as conveying and lifting can usually be realised with standardised gear units and gearmotors. However, there are also applications with customised requirements where industrial gearboxes from the modular design need to be modified to ensure an optimum fit.

And it is not uncommon for the conditions on site to be so special that customised gearboxes produced in batch size 1 are required. Custom-made industrial gearboxes that we can realise thanks to our industry expertise and decades of experience in in-house construction. In close co-operation with our customers and in conjunction with our global production plants.

In the steel industry, for example, we manufacture switchable industrial gear units for the vertical drives of ladle cranes as well as customised gear units for straightening machines, decoilers or comb rollers for rolling mills. We can also contribute to the smooth operation of many other industries and applications with our customised special gear units for new systems or with "drop-in" gear units for system modernisations. And this with a high degree of in-house added value, e.g. in the production of gearing components and shafts, or in case hardening, etc. In this way, we are always able to ensure drive technology of the highest quality and reliability for our customers.

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Practical examples of special gearboxes in the steel industry

Extreme temperatures and high dust content in the air, hot molten metal and open flames: The ambient conditions in industry could hardly be tougher. However, this is not the only challenge in a steelworks. Demanding applications require particularly robust and complex drive solutions.

Straightener drive

In the production of sheet steel, levellers are indispensable components in the strip feeding system. To ensure that the material to be fed can be precisely levelled in the rolling mill, a particularly robust and compact special gearbox is required. This special gearbox must enable the repeated back and forth bending and thus the reliable straightening of the sheet metal via the uniform drive of several shafts.

Rolling mill gearbox

Extremely robust and complex customised gearboxes are required for rolling mills in the steel industry, which are built with one or more output shafts depending on the number of rollers. In addition to continuous duty, these customised industrial gearbox solutions have to withstand particularly high thermal and mechanical loads. With our customised special gearboxes, you are always on the safe side.

Hoist drive for a ladle crane

We use a customised industrial gearbox in the form of a four-stage differential gearbox for the main vertical drive of a 180-tonne ladle crane. This powerful special gearbox weighs a total of 15.8 tonnes and is driven by two motors with a power rating of 191 kilowatts each. With the installed motor power, this gear unit achieves an operating torque of 225,000 Nm with a nominal torque of 500,000 Nm.

As a special feature, a planetary superimposition stage is integrated into this special gearbox for vertical drives, which ensures the functionality of the vertical drive even in the event of failure of one of the two motors. This ensures that the lifting process can still be completed with the full torque at half the lifting speed.

Crane applications in harbour logistics

Switchable hoist drives for container cranes

Critical applications that require a customised gear unit can also be found, for example, in the handling of freight containers. In order to be able to bridge the failure of a motoring operation, we use gearboxes in the vertical drives used there. gear units that can be shifted in idle state. This allows the gear ratio to be doubled and an "emergency lift" to be performed.

In this way, we ensure that the containers are safely set down on the ground. Our switchable special gearboxes for vertical drives are customised to your specific requirements.