STS Metal Bellows Couplings: High Quality Brand and Functionalities Combined

October 10, 2019

Drive couplings are expected to provide adequate power transmission efficiency. Well, the word “expected” doesn’t really do this challenging operation justice. There can be no backlash, no shaft deviation, and no connection misalignment issues in evidence when two shafts are properly power-synced. A tough mandate to implement, engineers use the slight give-and-play built into bellows couplings to assure efficient radial motion, even when one of the shafts isn’t performing optimally.

A High-Performance Shafting Solution: STS Metal Bellows Couplings

Situated at the top of the bellows jointing pyramid, the STS brand assures product reliability. Like many other German engineering vendors, this company uses the finest manufacturing standards and best alloys. That means the durable stainless steel hubs and bellow sections are always rated to handle huge quantities of torsional stress. Furthermore, the backlash-free design doesn’t use elastomeric inserts. Not that power transmission applications should avoid engineering plastics, of course. Many top-tier engineering services make perfectly fine elastomeric bellows, which are then strengthened with aluminium or steel mating segments. It’s just that plastic bellows aren’t usually rated to handle intense loading stresses or torsional loading effects. No, for maximum coupling rigidity and ultimate torsional strain resistance, STS metal bellows couplings are the surefire solution.

Assessing Stress-Handling Functionalities

So, what features come to the fore when these slightly flexible couplings are installed? For starters, they cope with shaft misalignment problems without themselves experiencing parts-damaging fatigue. The torsionally rigid shell halves also provide offset functionality when shaft backlash issues strike. For every full rotation of a high-tolerance metal bellows coupling, no radial looseness appears between the mating sections, so there can be no power transmission losses. Zero-backlash shaft locking mechanisms are extremely popular in applications that rely on shaft functions that measure exacting energy transactions. Spindle lifting machines and axially driven pumps fall into this category. Losses experienced by these types of machines can accumulate so much and so rapidly that their functions become attenuated.

That’s another thing about STS metal bellows couplings, the fact that they’re designed to function as work enhancement devices. In a small system, perhaps one that utilizes a single motor and pump, that feature is fairly important. Work will travel backlash-free from the prime mover to the pump impeller. However, the functions listed above become even more important when the bearing is installed in a multi-part, poorly aligned collection of equipment sub-assemblies. In here, tiny losses collect until they create a single output hampering force. STS metal bellows couplings zero-out efficiency and misalignment losses, and then transmit one-hundred percent of the resulting radial energy straight to the next shafting arrangement. In effect, this is an error misalignment corrector, one that uses its torsional stiffness to minimize all kinds of coupling defects.

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