Generation X.e industrial gear units, including geared motors, industrial gears (IGs), variable speed drives (VSDs), automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) and servo motors will all be assembled in SEW-EURODRIVE’s new factory in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“To cater for our growing customer base in markets across Africa, it has become necessary to increase local production capacities. Our new SEW-EURODRIVE building in Aeroton, Johannesburg, which will house our head office as well as assembly, warehousing and repair facilities, is now complete and we are currently in the final stages of laying out the assembly lines for geared motors and industrial gearboxes,” says SEW-EURODRIVE national operations manager South Africa Greg Perry.

“The Johannesburg assembly line for geared motors is designed for 7 000 units a month, and we are planning to build up to 100 IG units a month, doubling our current capacity. New spray booths and automated oil filling stations are being installed to cater for these volumes.”

The company asserts that all local assembly of gearboxes, VSDs and servo motors is conducted in accordance with its global quality standards and SEW South Africa is already certified by Germany’s quality department and the company also has ISO 9001 quality certification. The standardised assembly and logistics processes are now incorporated into SEW-EURODRIVE’s SAP system, which enables better traceability and visibility of all orders as they move through the assembly processes.

“We are starting to design the assembly flows for our X.e range, and we will be adding additional industrial gearboxes ranges as time goes by. Initially, we will be assembling the Generation X.e Series in sizes from 120 to 250, which embraces nominal torque classes from 12.8 to 175 kNm,” adds Perry.

The latest generation of industrial gear units in the X.e series has been designed with new improvements, aimed at making the products more robust, reliable, efficient and easier to maintain. The modular series is designed to be custom-built, by increasing the number of possible torque/speed combinations and fine-size graduations. Additional modular features and options include motor adapters, backstops, and various sealing and shaft systems, aimed at improving the ease of use and reliability of the systems.

Key applications across Africa include:

• Conveyor drives –  often required to operate in extremely dusty and very hot or cold conditions. New thermally optimised housings, particularly in the X180 and larger sizes, and the contact-free Taconite sealing system design, enable the drives to operate reliably in harsh conditions.
• Hoists ­– often feature the rope drum and the motor on the same side of a parallel-shaft unit, and the X.e hoist series offers an optimised choice of gear unit sizes, reduced gear unit weight and sufficient centre distances.
• Bucket elevators – required to lift bulk materials, the drive needs to be operated at low speed during maintenance. X.e series bucket elevator drives are equipped with a directly mounted auxiliary drive to perform this function while the main motor is switched off.
• Agitator and aerator drives – X.e agitator gear units in the 22 kNm to 90 kNm size range have extended bearing distances to absorb high radial and axial forces. In addition, thermally optimised housings allow the units to be used without external cooling, even in high performance agitation applications.

Other key improvement include: 

• Contactless sealing systems: reduce shaft and seal wear, improving reliability and service life.
• Thermally improved oil levels: reduce oil use, extend oil change intervals and improve thermal performance.
• Optimised bearing preload: gives users a choice between greater operating reliability in critical drive conditions or a longer bearing service life in moderate conditions.
• An improved bevel pinion housing: offers an increase in the service life of the sealing systems and an improvement in cold starting behaviour. 
• Optimised tooth flank topology: involves optimising the microgeometry of the gear tooth surfaces to enable operating torques and external forces to be transferred more accurately and reliably.

SEW-EURODRIVE’s DriveRadar suite of condition monitoring solutions for vibration, temperature and other key parameters can be seamlessly incorporated for early detection of damage to bearings or gears and to provide instant notifications to equipment operators about potential problems.

“When the new X.e assembly line is up and running at our factory in a few months’ time, we expect our delivery times, from receiving an order to shipping to site, to be significantly reduced,” Perry assures.

“We will also be in a better than ever position to deliver complete drive systems to industry, including system components such as couplings, brakes and sensors, all of which can be pre-mounted on a baseplate, along with VSDs, soft starters, sensors and all the connectivity needed to link to a customer’s control interface,” he concludes.