Kinematics 30-Year Assurance Program

Kinematics has long made it a priority to design for field durability. Our design philosophy is centered on technically understanding the application environments where our products are deployed, and coupling this understanding with continuous improvement fed by collected field and laboratory data – resulting in highly durable product designs.

Kinematics is in a unique position with over 1.3 million slew drives in the field and operating. This provides us with significant amounts of field data.  Statistically, KMI can quickly draw correlations and make design improvements or innovations to enhance field durability and reliability further.

Kinematics’ 30-year assurance programs are the result of several interrelated steps: designing for the application, integrating learning from our deployed field population, and accelerated lifetime testing. Our field durability data and Kinematics’ Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) results provide significant data and a statistical basis for design confidence in 30-year drive functionality.

Whether starting with a greenfield design or making innovations to existing products, Kinematics designs feed into our HALT activities, providing the foundation for validating durable and reliable designs. Slew drive performance is tested under continuously applied loads that accelerate the field conditions compared to regular operation. Environmental effects, including exposure to water, dust, temperature, and humidity, are also simulated and accelerated.  HALT provides the critical on-going loop to our iterative design process.

Kinematics slew drives constitute a mission-critical component for most applications, including solar trackers and industrial uses such as paving machines, man lifts, and factory automation.  The slew drives must operate reliably and efficiently for many years, supporting the application manufacturer’s overall reliability claims at the system level. With proper on-going factory suggested maintenance, such as lubrication intervals, Kinematics slew drives can be expected to have a service life of 30-years or more.

Kinematics is taking innovation further by designing “Smart Drives” containing sensors that continuously report essential drive conditions to the cloud.  Such intelligence will further accelerate the capture of data in ways that weren’t previously possible before, setting the stage for further improvements in drive performance and reliability.

 

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