Design of an Adjustable Roller Chain Coupling for Shafts of Different Diameters

The shafts are widely used in almost all types of the machines, vehicles and other industrial installations. Shafts are usually available up to 7 meters length in order to avoid inconvenience of manufacturability and transport. In order to have a greater length, it becomes necessary to join two or more lengths of shafts by means of couplings. Thus, the couplings are the essential part of most of the industrial machines. As we know, the different shaft diameters are used in the industry for different machines, which requires a wide size range of couplings for an industry. Therefore the industry needs to purchase many standard size conventional couplings respective to the various shaft diameters used by that industry. Moreover, these conventional couplings do not accommodate the situation, where there is a difference between the diameters of the shafts to be coupled. A feasible solution to the above problem is to use the proposed adjustable roller chain coupling, which can be adjusted according to the shaft diameter and allows some misalignment in shafts. In this paper, design and modulation of adjustable roller chain coupling has been done. This design is completed very intensively according to situation of use, static and dynamic loading conditions. The mechanism of this coupling consists of some moveable jaws relative to the flanges in which specific square blocks are tightened, and the shafts to be coupled are fixed in these blocks by the mean of keys or splines. The movement of jaws is facilitated by providing the radial slots in the flanges.