June 15, 2017 – Thomson Industries, a manufacturer of mechanical motion control solutions, has donated a ball screw assembly to The Geek Group National Science Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to help develop designs of Tesla Coils (TC). An R&D program has been initiated there to discover new uses for the TC with help from a new automated process for winding coils.
Thomson was selected because of their application engineering support and product offerings, which enabled delivery of a complete ball screw assembly. That Thomson ball screw assembly will help The Geek Group’s engineering team convert from typical manual winding to a faster automated process for winding thousands of coils required to conduct their experiments.
A Thomson customer support engineer guided The Geek Group engineering team in selecting the exact configuration to best match their needs. The product selected was a ball screw assembly that avoids any precision problems that may result from assembling components on site. The final configuration consisted of a Thomson FSI Style ball nut along with an eight-foot-long ball screw just under an inch in diameter.
The TC production program has already begun, and The Geek Group has plans for experimenting with larger coils in the future.