Couplings cannot be made in standard materials in certain applications and for rotodynamic reasons. Depending on the outcome of the driveline calculation, a coupling needs to be torsionally tuned. For this particular retrofit application our customer required a very low stiffness and a low weight that only could be achieved with a solid titanium spacer.
The flange-mounted 500 mm long disc coupling operates at 420Nm with a maximum speed of 18,000 rpm and weighs less than 4kg. The coupling design also includes a limited end-float feature of +/-1 mm.
Other means of optimising high performance coupling functionally are to reduce the overhung mass by incorporating reversed hubs and to select very high quality spacer materials besides titanium to reduce weight and/or tune the torsional stiffness.
