DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND ANALYSIS OF MULTI-UTILITY ZERO SLIP GRIPPER SYSTEM BY APPLICATION OF MATING WORM SYSTEM

Material handling is the primary activity of every manufacturing organization. It has been estimated that at least 15 to 25% of the cost of the product is attributable to material handling activities. In case of machine tools like lathe or vertical machining centres it is desired to handle heavy jobs, which is conventionally done manually using chain blocks. This method is time consuming, unsafe and takes a lot of labour time adding to unproductive time of machine. Thus there is a need of a modified work handling device in the form of jaw capable to handle heavy pipes as well as plates with equal efficiency. The jaw system incorporates a twin worm drive that is simply constructed. Two threaded rods, or “worm” screws, are meshed together. Each worm is wound in a different direction and has a different pitch angle. For proper mesh, the worm axes are not parallel, but slightly skewed .But by selecting proper, and different, pitch angles, the drive will exhibit either self-locking .