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NORD drives gigantic calenders

Conveyor belt manufacturer Legg Manufacturing from Halstead ventured on special dimensions: With a calender drive, belts with a width of up to 2.4 m needed to be produced. Large MAXXDRIVE drive units from NORD helped realise this huge project.

Bargteheide, 2019-09-16

From a factory that produced rubberised patches for agricultural binder canvasses in the 1930's, Legg developed into a worldwide and renowned supplier of conveyor belts for industry and agriculture. Always willing to think big, the company prospered, as shown by the latest expansion of its product line. An additional calendering machine expanded Legg’s production capacities and included a system of several heated rollers with molten material passed through the gaps. The new calender will enable the smooth production of belts with a width of 2.4 m. To realise this project, Legg relied on the partner company that has, for many years, given proof in a wide variety of applications: NORD DRIVESYSTEMS.

The cascade trick

It was necessary to avoid long drive shafts and instead cascade four drives in an innovative manner. The NORD application designers highly appreciated the new challenge. They arranged the MAXXDRIVE industrial gear units in an unusual configuration. The drive units were designed as a triple cascade arrangement with the fourth mounted laterally. For this purpose, the mounting of the gear unit housings and a sufficient support for dissipating the bending moments was necessary. In a calender with a single drive unit, the drive power is automatically distributed to all rollers. In such a multiple cascaded drive unit, maximum load requirements for each roller had to be newly calculated. Together, NORD and Legg designed a tailored support for the triple cascade. In the calender, NORD is represented in various ways: A NORD geared motor separately drives each roller of the new calender. They are also used in upstream machines like the heating and finishing mills as well as in several downstream rewinding stations.