Magnetic transmission could spell the end of gearboxes

It’s the sound every mechanic and technician dreads: the shriek of misaligned gears that tells you that something is very wrong in the gearbox. It heralds a probable equipment breakdown, outages and expensive repairs.

But this could be a thing of the past, according to researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, who have developed a transmission mechanism where none of the mechanical parts touch each other. Working by magnetism, the transmission system needs no lubrication and is immune to damage by wear and friction.

Developed under a European research project called MAGDRIVE, the system is essentially a magnetic gear reducer: in other words, it transforms the rotational speed of an input axle to a different speed of an output axle.

It does this without using toothed gears at all: as researcher Efrén Díez Jiménez explained, ‘it substitutes geared teeth with… magnets that repel and attract each other so that the transmission of couples and forces between the moving parts with contact is achieved.’