Planetary Gear Set
The Even Mix™ tote and drum mixer is powered with either electricity or air. It has a powerful motor that is designed to mix containers evenly and thoroughly with it’s patented design. An important part of their air and electric drive design is planetary gears. Planetary gears are gears that rotate around a central gear. Think of the sun and planets. The sun is the stationary gear, and the planets are the planetary gears. Makes sense?
This type of design allows us to have a smaller, lightweight, and more compact design with the higher torque that we need for some materials. These sorts of motor designs are made for lower RPM (revolutions per minute) or speed and increase in torque. Something like putting your car into first gear to get that torque you need to get out of a tight spot.
Our geared motors are designed with planetary gears as this is the most compact and lightweight motor design for our desired output. The electrical drive only weighs 10 lbs, so it’s easily moved from tank to tank. Both the electrical and the pneumatic (air) motor have top speeds of 160 RPMs. And, both mix liquids that are up to 50,0000 cps. CPS is an abbreviation for Centipoise, which is the viscosity of a material.
Planetary gear set offer a lower weight solution for higher torque output. It provides higher power density as the weight of the load is dispursed across the planets and not resting on one gear. Because of this weight disbursement, the gears last longer. Our planetary gears are made of metal to improve their longevity as well.
How a planetary gear set works
The planetary gears are just as you would imagine, those tiny sprockets with bumps all around the diameter that fit inside one another. As you turn one, the others turn with them. There is a stationary gear called the sun gear that the planetary gears move around. The planetary gear set is the outrings of the gear cluster, as the sun gear is in the center. Similar to our solar system structure. This outer ring is called a ring gear, and the planetary gears will move about it and the sun gear. These gears can be apart of a gear train that will provide input or output to a shaft. This video does a good job showing how a planetary gear set works.
The combination of gears will allow you to create a vast range of gear reductions. By combining these gear ranges and having them work together allows the drive to generate much higher torque than simply an air or electric motor would alone.
