| Abstract |
For machine builders, it is essential to have an optimal balance between economic benefit and fulfillment of the technical requirements when selecting an appropriate driveline. This paper proposes a practical tool for finding the optimal drive-motor-transmission combination from a database of available devices. The algorithm denoted as the optimal selection tool consists of four main steps. The three first steps are dedicated to efficiently finding the triplets that meet the technical requirements and feasibilities (such as current-, torque-, speed- and ratio-limitations). The last step implements the branch and bound algorithm to find the optimal solution in terms of price. The algorithm avoids unnecessary checks of not technically feasible combinations. This is possible because the motors and drives are sorted with ascending peak current and the transmissions with an ascending ratio in the database. The algorithm's utility is demonstrated in a validation example of a transfer robot (pick-and-place unit), where a drive-motor-transmission combination with the lowest possible price must be selected. This combination must fulfill the technical requirements. Because of the optimization, the possible 3276 combinations were reduced to 302 technically feasible combinations, which means a significant reduction of 90\%. Furthermore, this reduction implies a decrease in computational load. After that, the fourth step selects the combination with the lowest price, which is 1668 units. This price is five times lower than the most expensive combination (8408 units). |
