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US 7,493,837 B2Granted
Partition room and spacer ball for ball screw unit
AssigneeHiwin Technologies Corp.
InventorsWen-Chia Wu, Yuh-Siang Lin
Life of this patent
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AssigneeHiwin Technologies Corp.
InventorsWen-Chia Wu, Yuh-Siang Lin
Estimating the term…
A ball screw unit has a plurality of partition-rooms each of them accommodating a spacer ball interposed between two load carrying balls. The partition room is formed into two oblique frustum shaped recesses each of them extends a flared mouth tilted downwards to the longitudinal axis of the ball screw unit. The partition room is made of elastic polymer material to facilitate pushing the spacer ball into an oblate ellipsoidal hole opened on the partition room, and the hole is also communicated with the two recesses. With this structure, the spacer balls can be held stably in the partition rooms without the fear of escaping or occurrence of disorganized ball squeezing during operation of the ball screw unit. Besides, the dimension of spacer ball may be made as small as possible so as to increase the number of load carrying balls thereby resulting in improvement of load carrying capability of the structure.
A partition room essentially made of an elastic material for setting a spacer ball of a ball screw unit for making rotational contact with two load carrying balls at two sides thereof, wherein said partition room is formed into two recesses to couple with the spherical surfaces of the adjacent load carrying balls, a hole communicating with said two recesses is opened through said partition room with its center aligned to the center of the line connecting the vertexes of said two recesses for filling said spacer ball into it, two openings of said hole communicating with said recesses have a diameter smaller than that of said spacer ball so that said spacer ball is able to make rotational contact with two adjacent load carrying balls to help them roll smoothly, wherein said hole for filling with said spacer ball is formed into an oblate ellipsoid with its major axis (length of the hole) being longer than the diameter of said spacer ball, while the minor axis (width of the hole) thereof is shorter.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.