Integrating Mechanical and Electrical Test Components to Characterize a Magnetic Gear Winch

Magnetic gears are an innovative concept that has many advantages over traditional gears: including no friction between gears, low maintenance, no debris from lubricants, and quiet operation. In order to test that the magnetic gear winch designed by Trex Enterprises meets the standards of its client, we designed and built two carts—one carrying the winch and the other the weights. The load cart has a programmable braking system that controls the force or speed that the winch pulls at and sends the feedback to the computer. One of the imperative problems was bringing the mechanical parts and electrical system together. We connected the load cell and the circuit to the electric brakes and made sure that the brakes received signals from the electrical system and maintained an actively controlled load. This was accomplished through a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller that uses the load cell to provide real-time information on the pull force. The PID controller was tuned to minimize oscillations and stabilize the load set point. During testing, the winch cart was anchored and pulled the load cart in a straight line as a program collected pull force and speed data. We established a load set point to observe the changes in the speed until a steady reading was attained. This was repeated for various set points. As a result, we were able to fully characterize winch performance over its full range of operations. Future work with the carts will involve testing winch designs currently in the works.