Meeting linear motion challenges head on, and within budget

(See ABSSAC at MachineBuilding.Live, 2 October 2024, on stand 5)

For large diameters ball screws, ABSSAC offers an excellent range of Industrial class ball screws encompassing screw diameters from 12mm up to 80mm as standard with C7 accuracy. As an established supplier of ball screws, including support bearings and other related ancillary products, ABSSAC also provides the expertise in assuring engineers that they are specifying the correct linear products for their applications. All ball screw products can be supplied machined to print and ready to fit.

Precision, reliability, quality, value for money and on time delivery are all things that ABSSAC puts at the heart of the ball screw ranges it supplies. And with existing customers enjoying a 98% satisfaction in a recent survey, ABSSAC is rightly proud of its track record.

Typically available are precision ball screws with outside diameters ranging from 4mm to 16mm with a range of leads per diameter. The transport ball screw diameters range between 10mm to 80mm in diameter and as the product name suggests, points at the at the more industrial type applications with dynamic load capacities from 900 to 13449 kgf being catered for, without loss of accuracy and efficiency or high drive torque. Stocked screw lengths of transport ball screws of up to 4500mm are available up to 32mm in outside diameter and screw lengths up to 5600mm long for screws above 40mm in outside diameter.

Lastly, in the portfolio, is the capability to produce unique, application specific ball nuts. Looking at how the actual nut fits within the application or other functions that the nut could achieve during operation has often led to a reduction in parts with the linear design.

All ball screws supplied from ABSSAC can be delivered with the journal ends of the screws machined to print, so that the parts are ready to fit into the suitable bearing or application. This eliminates potential scrap rates for the customer but also ensures that the assemblies are supplied and certified to the accuracy tolerances required.

Pharmaceutical application: electronic microscope

A recent application for ABSSAC specified a precision ball screw within an electronic microscope that placed a precision guillotine against test pharmaceutical materials. Extremely fine slithers of test material are then cut off the material in rapid succession for microscopic investigation. A small variance in the sliced materials overall thickness would have had a detrimental effect on the accuracy of the microscopes results.

The low friction within ball screw designs means that a high mechanical efficiency is delivered compared to that of lead screw designs. A typical ball screw may be 90 percent efficient, versus 50 percent efficiency of a lead screw of equal size. Ball screw specification is often a result of an applications requirement to have smooth, accurate and repeatable linear movement.

The application demanded a high degree of repeatable accuracy and a precision ball screw could also satisfy the other design prerequisites for it to be compact, quiet and cost effective. By using precision ground ball nuts and then pairing them with precision cold rolled ball screw threads, ABSSAC provided a ball screw with lead accuracies of less than 52 microns of error for 300mm of linear travel. Utilising both ground nuts and rolled screws formats enabled large cost savings, when compared against a completely ground ball screw equivalent.