Philadelphia Gear Introduces Universal Cooling Tower Drive

Philadelphia Gear Corporation announces the availability of the new Universal Cooling Tower DriveTM. This new drive offers a solution to replace cooling tower drives and spare parts. The Universal Cooling Tower Drive comes in two sizes and replaces the eight most popular Philadelphia Gear cooling tower drive models currently in use. The new drive can also be used in place of most other drive brands, with minimal modification. Two primary design elements make the new cooling tower drive universal - its spacer plates and change gears. Base plate spacer adapters make the UCT Drive modifiable to virtually any legacy cooling tower application by adjusting the height of the output shaft. Further, the location of the change gears has been designed so that the spiral bevel gears within the main housing do not have to be modified to change gear ratios. A wide range of gear ratios can be achieved by using different sets of change gears external of the main housing. This innovation means that the Universal Cooling Tower Drive can be installed in as little as 24 hours - only the smaller change gears need to be installed when the unit is ordered. Costs are also reduced as a result. "Cooling towers are utilized by most manufacturing and process industries, and are often difficult to access for predictive maintenance," says Carl Rapp, President and CEO, Philadelphia Gear Corp. "Durability, rapid deployment, and competitive cost are all part of the highly engineered solution that our Universal Cooling Tower Drive represents." In addition to its universal design, the drive exceeds all existing low-noise mandates prescribed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). It operates at 82 decibels at three feet, a nearly 50 percent reduction in the allowable decibel level prescribed by OSHA.