Reduce Weight & Eliminate Grease in Automotive Applications with dryspin® lead screws

In this webinar, learn about dryspin lead screw assemblies and the variety of different automotive applications they are suited for. Material data and test results are discussed, as well as specific benefits offered by dryspin including reduced weight relative to comparable alternatives and grease-free operation. Instructions on how to use the free dryspin lead screw configurator are also included.

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Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] all right everybody welcome to the igis webinar on dry spin lead screws in automotive i will give it another minute before nick and sebastian start but i'll take this second just to introduce myself my name is matt maury i'm the dr island linear bearing product manager from north america

00:00:19 and that includes our systems of lead screws and today we have nick isabella who is the product specialist for that product line in north america as well as sebastian vocal who is the automotive manager for igus incorporated here [Music] thank you so much matt for for the introduction thank you welcome everybody uh today it will be everything around

00:00:46 dry spin and automotive and yeah i'm pretty optimistic we will have some great great benefits for you talking about weight reduction eliminating grease and many many more and yeah let's take a short look into the agenda shortly we will discuss a little bit about igis and what are our special products from our site then we will move over to um what is

00:01:08 dryspin and really see what this is for an efficient system we have here for sure we will talk a lot about applications what kind of applications we have in automotive with this particular product and then we will have a lot of great options for you to have really short lead times really fast sample opportunities speaking of samples uh stay tuned at the

00:01:32 end of this seminar we will also have a lot of great free samples for you and yeah happy to show them for you uh for sure also q a uh time after the seminar but also feel free to put some questions in the chat we have the team available who can already answer them during the seminar as well so thank you once again and let's talk a little bit about igis and

00:01:56 one of the slogans we have is like motion plastics and that kind of describes everything what we do as a company so we really take care with our products in areas emotion is happening and this is exactly when you can think about igus and this we are doing since 1964. you can see our founder here mr gunterblast and his wife margaret plaza

00:02:19 and they founded it actually in their private garage invested into an injection molding machine worked out the first particular part you can see here we ever developed for iges and yeah what did we achieve with this we exchanged a product a metal part from a company and a machine with this injection molded plastic part and we achieved a longer lifetime in the application and also

00:02:43 reduced the cost and that's exactly what we still follow one other slogan we have is tack up like technology improvement and cost down over time we went into the red brick building here and nowadays this is our headquarter in germany in cologne and our uh really really great um factory also in rhode island the us also during the time we developed many

00:03:08 many more products and now we have a lot of stuff available coming from energy chains over two cables a lot of different plane bearings sleeve flange spherical bearings as you can see here but also linear bearings we have many many gear options nowadays we have rollers available ball bearings and a lot of 3d printing stuff we will show you later especially when we talk about

00:03:33 fast samples and yeah options to start projects with and today we will focus a lot on this dry spin product we offer here what is special for all the parts we do and all the products is the material and that is what igus develops on its own so we have engineers who are developing these engineered plastics and high performance

00:03:57 plastics for motion applications and what we do is we use a base polymer from the market then really reinforcing them like making them stronger with fibers with fillers to have an answer for every application with our different eyeglide materials you know from our catalog and last but not least one of the best ingredients we have are the solid lubricants so with this our parts will

00:04:24 be self-lubricating they have a very low wear rate and a very low coefficient of friction just to name a couple of benefits for more of the benefits we have we will come back later when we talk about applications and speaking of wear rate speaking of lifetime etc for sure we need to test and that's what we do so we not really only calculate something we we test them

00:04:48 in the laboratory so we take the products we have we have the different materials different load different um different parameters per application for the test in combination with linear motion oscillating rotating motion and you can see it here in the laboratory around 16 000 test per year motion test where we take the results put them in our online tools

00:05:10 and you can just come on our website visit our website and you can calculate the lifetime choose the right material and for sure we will do this also together with you and now that being said about igus what is dry spin nick over to you yeah sebastian thank you very much uh thank you everybody for coming today um and like sebastian says uh what is dry

00:05:34 spin um so dry spin is a patented thread geometry that i guess created we took the best portions of standard acme and trapezoidal thread patterns mainly being the fact that lead screws are used for power transmission and we took some of the most vulnerable portions of what a lead screw does being a sliding mechanism lead screws are prone to have higher amounts of

00:05:57 noise in the application also because it has a sliding component the nut is a pretty big wear item so we wanted to optimize these and help eliminate some of these problems so we took the thread profile we rounded off the crest of the thread this helps reduce noise and vibration in the application and by reducing vibration you're also eliminating some of the heat buildup in

00:06:19 the material and this also helps extend the lifetime of the polymer now one of the things that we also did in doing this rounding off of the teeth profile is flattening the angle of the thread lead screws are all about efficiency so converting the torque and power of a motor into linear motion and basically our lead screws if you

00:06:40 were to take a similar thread profile compare it to a competitor thread profile it would be slightly more efficient thus requiring slightly less torque than a similar thread profile elsewhere and by doing that we also went away from a standard symmetrical thread profile and moved to what we call an asymmetrical thread profile so by

00:07:02 flattening the angle of the thread we're actually allowing for close to 30 percent more material for the nut to be actually uh more wear surface so that also helps increase the lifetime of the nut as well now all of our drive spin lead screws are standard in 304 stainless steel that provides the best coefficient of friction uh when paired with our

00:07:24 polymers that we created and you can see here this is our test lab this is data that we did it's two different comparisons an efficiency test and also a lifetime test compared against two competitors um you can see that we use uh roughly a 200 newton load we had a speed of 100 rpm it was apples to apples so it was all lead screws that had the same thread

00:07:49 pattern so for example in this case all three lead screws were 10 millimeter diameter with a 25 millimeter lead and all the screws were uncoated so we would be on even playing field for coefficient of friction and you can see that we had the lowest wear rate and also we had the best efficiency rating for the lead screw now getting more into the materials that

00:08:10 igus has to offer when it comes to our catalog it's quite vast in terms of materials that igus has created our engineered polymers are used for many different types of applications specifically for linear applications however and lead screws specifically we have several different materials that are standard in our catalog so you can see here off to the right we have eye

00:08:32 glide j i glide j is our i would say more or less our most commonly used material for lead screw nuts they work uh it works mainly in about 80 to 90 percent of applications and then for more specialized applications we have different types of materials so for example under the hood and a car we actually have a high temperature material j350

00:08:54 eyeglide r is also known as another material that has low moisture absorption it also is slightly vibration dampening so in areas where you might see a little more vibration in the car this could be something to help eliminate noise and then we have particular materials that pair really well with anodized aluminum lead screws for lighter weight

00:09:15 applications j200 with an aluminum lead screw provides hands down the best wear rate from any other combination of screw and nut material that i guess has to offer so for high duty cycle applications this would be something that would be desirable for an application and not standard in our catalog in terms of publishing but we also have

00:09:37 new materials that we've created specifically for interior applications in the automotive industry that are meant to be low fogging so we we want outgassing to be at a minimum for those materials in the interior and now we can move back over to sebastian to talk about where we might find some lead screws and applications for the automotive industry

00:09:58 thank you nick and yeah since it's like such an efficient product honestly it's we can find it nearly everywhere so we start a little bit in inside of the interior applications in automotive so one very typical example for this product you can find it in the seat lens adjustment so driving it back and forth which is nowadays like very common to have it

00:10:21 automatically inside of the vehicles for sure um another serial uh production part we are already selling into is the rear seat adjustment you can find the orange part here for adjusting uh the backrest of the of the second row and then for sure also in the steering height adjustment you can find our lead screw mechanisms but yeah since uh the cars getting more and more motion

00:10:48 areas even for the armrest it's very typical uh you have a kind of a motion area or you will even have a center console and the larger vehicles where you can really move um the center console back and forth between the first and the second row having a fridge inside or something else even and then you can use our dry spin system based on the efficiency we

00:11:12 have and this picture shows or summarize uh summarizes a lot of interior applications or even exterior applications for sure so an actuator so if you have a linear actuator where you can see the spindle here next to the dc motor the dry spin is like based on the efficiency what nick presented to us one of a very very very um strong tool for

00:11:37 that and a strong product and especially because of the self-lubricating material we have we don't need any greasing so you will have the same performance over the lifetime which is also very very important for sure just to name it here inside of actuators you can find all our sliding bearings you can find our gears like a lot of more iges products inside

00:11:59 of all these applications are possible as well so already mentioned some benefits so here you can see some key benefits for sure the self-lubricating of the material is a big factor but the nvh inside of cars like in the interior the passenger portion of the vehicle is so silent becoming

00:12:20 even more silent if we talk about battery vehicles electrical vehicles so you don't want to hear any real noise from the application side inside of the seat or the steering wheel or all the others so this is where drivespin is playing its benefits and yeah for sure also lightweight it's much lighter weight than a metal part and for

00:12:42 the nut at least because the spindle for sure is the same but the saving weight is another big factor for sure also for nuts and all these common products going over to the exterior side and here you can find for example our dry spin in the front spoiler system you can see it here so driving the the front spoiler up and down depending on the road depending on the on the driving speed you have

00:13:09 with the vehicle so many vehicles have them nowadays and yeah already running in serial supply in millions of parts actually with our dry spin and the main thing was definitely self-lubricating but also the efficiency level of the spindle nut combination from us for sure we can find them also in the parking brake actuators as you can see

00:13:34 here or for sure running boards are possible um definitely different versions this one is more related also to a bus system but yeah you can see the drive spin spindle here another key application is also the tailgate actuator so this is also a very very famous application nowaday nowadays pressing one button and the tailgate is

00:13:57 opening so here you can see also our dry spin spindles as well and the roof systems as we see it here or in all kind of brake boosters also here in orange you can see our spindle so we always try to say motion plastic so you can kind of nearly think about i guess for dry spin in linear applications and here we can see the the key benefits for the

00:14:24 exterior side and for sure it's also the resistancy against dust and dirt if we think about this spoiler application for example you will have splashes of of water it can be in contact with dust and dirt depending especially on some areas it's much more the chance to get it inside and then because it's self locating you don't need wet greasing no external greasing this is a perfect area

00:14:47 for using our materials for sure corrosion free is a big point for the nut because it's out of plastic and what i mentioned before the water splashes all salt spray test this is the the areas where we are at home let me say with our products all right that being said about the applications over to you nick what kind of options do we have to start a project

00:15:14 thanks sebastian so to get a project started we have several different online tools that i highly recommend when working with engineers to take a look at these are really great springboards to get your application started figure out what particular lead screw might be best when balancing the amount of life cycles

00:15:32 versus costs that you can get from particular lead screws from i guess so first and foremost typically i will steer people to take a look at our product finder better known as our expert system and this is basically a lifetime calculator but it is bit more than that um you can see here just some cutouts from from the uh from the online tool you can configure a application

00:15:55 based on particular lead screw nuts that we have to offer so you can actually change the uh the part that's being used to see how the lifetime will vary compared to a cylindrical machined nut or a molded nut and see what the difference in lifetime might be based on cost things like that so you can weigh your options with our whole catalog of standard parts

00:16:19 and then once you move through the application uh you know selecting what particular lead screw nut you'd like to evaluate you're going to put in a few data points of information about your application personally i think this tool is probably one of the easiest to use when it comes to all of the tools that igus has to offer you only have to put in four data points the load the speed

00:16:39 the duty cycle and the stroke of the application so as long as you have all of that you can kind of move forward and find an option for your application now you can see here once you move through to the end you plug all your data in you're going to have a long range of products to choose from now you can

00:16:58 refine this if you know what lead screw you might want to look at and evaluate from the beginning you can select a specific thread profile and see how long that will last or if you don't know where to look yet you can leave everything as an option so you can see here this is a very long list this basically will spit out how many uh life cycles uh the the lead screw nut

00:17:21 will ask for um what the torque is to drive the load uh which is a very important data point because if you're using a motor this helps you spec in the the lead screw based on the torque curve of the motor that you have and then it also gives you a 2d file of the lead screw nut so you can see the basic dimensions of the part and same thing for the screw some technical data with

00:17:42 that so you get a whole bunch of pertinent information in one convenient place moving on to the next tool that we have and this is by far my favorite tool that igus has to offer it's the configurator so once you have a lead screw picked out and you know where you want to go with your application from a design standpoint now you can move into

00:18:00 actually customizing that lead screw to fit your application so for example say you need to add a journal to your lead screw to work with a coupling that has a d-flat in it you can add that to the screw directly through this online tool this tool will give you a price anywhere from 1 to 49 pieces and that will come directly from the tool you don't have to

00:18:21 get talked to anybody for this you can request a formal quote directly through this tool as well and then anything over that 49 pieces it triggers me to get involved and then i would price that out for you anything over that 49 pieces now with this online tool it takes about five minutes to use you can add a whole slew of different machining options to your lead screws flats keyways

00:18:44 feather key grooves you can add thread to the journal of the screw so if you have a direct drive motor you can add that thread profile to the journal to screw directly into your motor and the cost keeps changing based on that those additional machining options that you add in now after all that is done

00:19:04 once you're set with what you're configuring you can download a 2d print and it's a detailed print it gives you a specialized print number and then once you put it into the shopping cart it will then generate a special ordering part number that saves your part into the profile of igis erp system so everything is automated once you place

00:19:25 an order everything is already set up in the background and it's very seamless to get the order started for your part now a little more discussion about some of our catalog options that we have to offer for our lead screw nuts like i mentioned before we have several different catalog materials that we publish so we have thousands of different lead

00:19:45 screw nuts that we can ship from stock and 24 to 48 hours or less i think everybody knows throughout covid many different uh companies have had supply chain struggles what we're aiming to do especially in this year and moving forward is holding more parts in stock that way we can get these to you quickly to start your project so taking advantage of these catalog options to

00:20:09 get your project started for prototypes is a great way to get your project going and get it going quickly also we have the ability another online tool that we have to create sls laser-centered 3d printed parts this online tool is great has a drag and drop feature so you can take your step file stl many different types of file formats you can drag that and drop it

00:20:31 right into the online tool and it will basically sped out a price to you in a lead time because we have a live print lab in the us where we have two different printers we're basically able to provide a lead time anywhere for two to five days so you can get an sls printed part that not only will work in terms of

00:20:51 form and fit but you can get a little bit of function out of these parts as well the standard nut material that we typically recommend to print parts in is called i3 this is pretty similar to our eyeglide j material so you can actually use this for some initial testing and you can get a baseline and understanding that yes it's not the actual material

00:21:11 that we you would be using in production but you can get an initial look at our material and see if it would be working in your application we do have the ability to print all different types of parts and the best part about this tool is the fact that everything is based on the weight so it doesn't matter how complicated the part is

00:21:29 it just matters with the weight so as long as the part is light it's going to be cheap if it's a larger part and it's going to be a little more expensive in the online tool but this is a really great feature and it helps reduce on time lead time and cost compared to machined parts now we do have the ability to provide all of our parts being machined from bar

00:21:49 stock and other semi-finished materials and i do want to note that if you your company does have locations outside the us that they would be sourcing parts from we do have print labs located in germany and china as well now as you continue on with your project again those 3d printed parts are great to get your project started

00:22:10 once you do settle in on a design and you're more in you know more willing to to start placing orders for some more production ready parts closer to production quality we can machine these parts from our semi-finished products so we have uh just about the majority of our materials

00:22:31 that we make in extruded bar stock up to 100 millimeters in diameter so we can make a wide range of parts so for example you can see this lead screw nut over here to the right this is for a 50 millimeter diameter lead screw with a metal uh custom made adapter for an extremely high load application so we have the ability to make a large variety of lead screw nuts from our

00:22:54 semi-finished products uh as well as tube stock to get past that hundred millimeter uh od and then we also have plate stock now the benefits to machining parts from our semi-finished products are the fact that you're going to get a part that has better tolerances more closely to what would represent a production part compared to those 3d printed parts

00:23:15 and you can still get a pretty fast lead time from these as well typically we're around six weeks for parts that are machined from bar stock last but not least would be our world famous injection molding capabilities in the last few years we've really spent a lot of time investing in infrastructure for molding lead screw

00:23:33 nuts so building up a repertoire of some standard catalog parts that you can get from stock uh but also the fact that we have a tooling department ready to go to create a tool for your project so if you need a custom made nut something from our catalog isn't going to fit into your application we can make a tool for you that would be staying in igis it would be maintained

00:23:55 by igis for your project and one of the things that we also do it's an added benefit is the fact that our tooling team works to optimize the designs that you've created to make them more um more moldable so you can see here as an example this was quite a large lead screw knot that the customer had to work with it was one solid part other than the od

00:24:18 for the thread our tooling department came up with a way to optimize this for molding by adding these cutout features which also helped optimize the part in terms of a loading capacity so this part is being used for an extremely high load adding these cutout features actually strengthen the part rather than it being

00:24:36 one solid part so our tooling department is a value added to the process as well and one of the things that we've really improved upon in the last two years i would say is our ability to not only mold the blank but also mold the thread in the nut during the process of molding so this helps increase the production time cutting down on lead time even more

00:24:59 than once you would normally mold a blank and then tap the thread in so now we can actually mold the nut and the thread all at once and this also help further scale the cost down as production volumes increase and now back over to sebastian to talk about quality thank you nick like 3d printing machined options like very very great ways to to

00:25:21 start into projects with special designs custom made products for your individual applications if the catalog doesn't fit inside of it so very very nice for automotive for sure quality management is key and is one of the biggest requirements we have to fulfill and you need a partner you can trust you you want to have a partner for long-term relationship and that's what

00:25:46 we want to be for you so for sure we are satisfied certified by iso 9001 we have the iit f6 949 but also environment stuff like iso 14 0 0 1 additionally to that we have for our materials like for sure fogging tests burning rates certificates reach ga dsl we do imds for you so all of that is based for the quality

00:26:12 but also additionally we do an optical control check for the parts you can see kind of our system here it's an optical control visual check by camera systems up and down and from the side and the parts going over a plate being checked controlled by cameras and only pushed out to the back immediately for you if they are okay and this is also another big tool to give you 100

00:26:39 control checked parts also i think similar to the 3d printing what nick showed we want to have global standards and we want to give you a great partnership around the world and we have 35 subsidiaries you can find in in different countries around the world and and usa for sure poland italy taiwan china and many many

00:27:03 more and also additionally we have 55 partners in other countries so yeah we want to give you the best possible service support working with the same company talking about global projects especially also in automotive this is a very common thing and usually the customers really really are happy with it so that they can talk to igus in china they can talk

00:27:26 to our eggs in the us for the same projects i mentioned in the beginning for sure please feel free to reach out we have a lot of great free samples starting with a brochure a lot of dry spin information inside showing uh much more information also on the application side on the efficiency what nick presented then we have

00:27:49 the one of the perfect samples to give you an idea how efficient the system is so this not a spindle combination it will move in a couple of seconds completely out of without any external greasing so this is a very great sample to give over to you to like to see how this product is really working in reality

00:28:12 we also have a great thermocouple especially in the winter times this could be nice but before you fill in your coffee or your tea before that you can put out the samples we will have in there for example this sample sleeve is also in the cup and many more related actuator samples like sliding bearings

00:28:30 gears etc are in there so if you want to have such a sample uh just let us know uh for sure we have a lot of boxes like the automotive box with many more parts inside we have an acme box with another lead screw example or even we can set up a corner for you we call it a sample corner so you can see this part here we can place it in your factory uh in your engineering offices we can put all

00:28:55 the samples we have and are related to your applications inside we will refill it for sure over time to keep it always fresh always full of ideas for starting new projects together with us and yeah again just let us know and we will be happy to give you samples at any time and yeah that being said thank you very much again for joining i hope it was

00:29:19 interesting i hope some information are valuable for you and just let us know if you have questions projects suggestions any application you want to talk about for sure we are happy to have visits on site we have we are happy to have virtual support also virtual visits are possible we have a great uh trade show exhibition space we can do a virtual tour with you

00:29:45 we can have lunch and learns and yeah if maybe colleagues of your didn't have chance to join this seminar for sure we want to do and can do this for you uh not uh important how many people are available we are always happy to present you something about igis and our products so just let us know and yeah also for sure a lot of content on youtube on our home page we have a great

00:30:08 blog with a lot of information in the engineer's toolbox and again thank you very much and over to unique yeah thank you all very much for coming we appreciate it [Music] you

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Reduce Weight & Eliminate Grease in Automotive Applications with dryspin® lead screws

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