Excel-Lent software from Excel Gear, Inc., determines optimum product parameters for various industries and is now on sale through the website below. Download a demo to see how easy it is to design a new gearbox. Excel-Lent is a versatile program allowing non-standard center distance or matching a new gear to an existing gear by clicking the indicated option. The material tables provided have all the commercially available materials listed, with heat treat and mechanical properties to allow the user to choose any gear material from the list to fit their need.

"Although commercial software has long been available in the gear industry, it has been too expensive or too complicated to be used by engineers without specialized gear design knowledge," says Excel company president N.K. "Chinn" Chinnusamy. "Our software is specifically designed with a user-friendly interactive input screen providing defaults and options in accordance with the AGMA 2001 standard." 

The users of Excel-Lent software can navigate through the input screens to edit, analyze and produce reports on the optimum gear and gearbox design for various industrial and other applications. "This software is not designed for any specific industry," continues Chinnusamy. "It can be used for machine tools, heavy materials handling equipment or even the wind turbine industry. For the wind turbine industry, for example, the designer needs a full understanding of all the operating loads on the gear members to arrive at the required power rating."

The key calculations performed are the AGMA power rating and load calculations, including bending strength geometry factor (J) and pitting resistance geometry factors (I). Output from the software is a single page of data printed in a format that is easy to read and interpret. Other commercial software typically prints five or six pages of information, which may be confusing to most design engineers unless they are gear experts, Chinnusamy further observed. The users of Excel-Lent need not be familiar with AGMA standards to use this software. Those who are not gear engineers can also benefit from the gear engineering knowledge embedded in the software package. Excel-Lent contains three sections - design, analysis and gear dimensions. Any of the sections can be used individually to run calculations.  On a typical job, according to Excel Gear, hundreds of hours typically spent doing the calculations can be saved.