Cunningham Industries, Inc.

Non-circular gears can be used to achieve - with mathematical precision - virtually any function requiring transition between input and output gear displacement or velocity. They can be designed and manufactured in any required size or shape to perform a wide variety of mechanical functions, including those involving complex displacement and velocity changes.

Multispeed gears are designed to be used where several constant speed segments are required. Transitions between speeds are made by using special function segments between the constant speed portions of the gearing sequence. Typically, multispeed gear pairs will have sinusoidal transitions and will not be identical. Identical input and output gearing can be achieved with elliptical transitions.

You can use non-circular gears as cam substitutes when you need more than just rotational movement. When you add an additional cam with the same shape, major radial loads can be handled. Odd-shaped products are great for this, as the cam-gear can be the same shape as the product in packaging machinery.

An ellipse is defined by a set of points in a plane, such that the sum of the distances from two fixed points - the foci - to any point in the set is a constant. This enables elliptical gears cut about their foci to run at a constant center distance. The velocity ratio resulting from elliptical gears varies between 1K and K during one cycle of speed change, where K is the maximum gear ratio. Multilobe gears can be derived from unilobe gears. In appropriate situations, elliptical gears may be cascaded to obtain varying speed-change characteristics, giving an effective ratio of from 1 to K^2 . Bilobe gears (oval gears) have been used in flowmeters and pumps. Using precision elliptical bilobe gears, flowmeters can have good linearity over a wide range of flow rates and viscosities