POWER SCREW

 is a mechanical device used for converting rotary motion into linear motion and transmitting power.
 A power screw is also called a translation screw.
 It uses helical translatory motion of the screw thread in transmitting power rather than clamping
the machine components
 The main applications of power screws are as follows:
1. to raise the load, e.g., screw-jack
2. to obtain accurate motion in machining operations, e.g., lead-screw of lathe,CNC,3d printer
3. to clamp a work piece, e.g., a vice;
4. to load a specimen, e.g., universal testing machine

There are three essential parts of the power screw

1. Screw
2. Nut
3. a part to hold either the screw or the nut in its place (body)

Depending upon the holding arrangement power screws operate in two different ways:
1. The screw rotates in its bearing, while the nut has axial motion. eg. The lead screw of the lathe
2. The nut is kept stationary and the screw moves in an axial direction. eg. A screw jack and machine vice.
A power screw offers the following advantages:
 A power screw has large load carrying capacity.
 The overall dimensions of the power screw are small, resulting in compact construction.
 A power screw is simple to design.
 The manufacturing of a power screw is easy without requiring specilised machinery. Square threads are turned on
the lathe. Trapezoidal threads are manufactured on a thread milling machine.
 A power screw provides large mechanical advantage. A load of 15 kN can be raised by applying an effort as small
as 400 N. Therefore, most of the power screws used in various applications like screw-jacks, clamps, valves and
vices are manually operated
 A power screw provides precisely controlled and highly accurate linear motion required in machine tool
applications.
 A power screw gives smooth and noiseless service without any maintenance.
 There are few parts in a power screw. This reduces cost and increases reliability.
 A power screw can be designed with self-locking property. In screw-jack application, self-locking characteristic is
required to prevent the load from descending on its own.

The disadvantages of a power screw are as follows:

 A power screw has very poor efficiency, as low as 40%
 High friction in threads causes rapid wear of the screw or the nut , In case of square threads, the nut is usually
made of soft material and replaced when worn out Therefore, wear is a serious problem in power screws.

There are two types of applications of power screws:

1. Applications where high efficiency is desired e.g power transmission applications such as lead screw
and presses.
2. Applications where low efficiency is desired. The applications where low efficiency is desired for the
purpose of self-locking, are screw jacks, clamps and vices.
The efficiency of a power screw is increased if sliding friction is replaced by rolling friction.
This principle is used in recirculating ball screw

By: Eng. Ahmed Adel 1

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Threads
The threads used for fastening purposes, such as V-threads are not suitable for power screws. The purpose of
fastening threads is to provide high frictional force, which lessens the possibility of loosening the parts assembled
by threaded joint.
On the other hand, the purpose of power transmission threads is to reduce friction between the screw and nut.
Therefore, V-threads are not suitable for power screws.
Screws with smaller angle of thread, such as trapezoidal threads, are preferred for power transmission.

There are two popular types of threads used for power screws
 Square
 ISO metric trapezoidal 30 deg , Acme (29 deg)
1- Square Thread
The square thread provides the greatest strength and efficiency and also eliminates any radial component of force
between the screw and nut.
𝒑
𝒕=
𝟐
𝜷
𝒑
𝒃=
𝟐

𝒅𝒐 = 𝒅𝒊 + 𝒑
𝒅𝒐 + 𝒅𝒊 𝒑
𝒅𝒎 = = 𝒅𝒊 + 𝟐
𝟐
𝜷 = 𝟎°

By: Eng. Ahmed Adel 2

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2. Trapezoidal and acme threads
are identical in all respects except the thread angle. In an acme thread, the thread angle is 29°
instead of 30° in trapezoidal.
𝒑
𝒕=
𝟐
𝒃 = 𝟎. 𝟑𝟕𝟎𝟕 𝒑
𝒅𝒐 = 𝒅𝒐 + 𝒑
𝒅𝒐 + 𝒅𝒊 𝒑
𝒅𝒎 = = 𝒅𝒊 + 𝟐
𝟐
𝜷 = 𝟏𝟒. 𝟓 ° 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐀𝐂𝐌𝐄
= 𝟏𝟓 ° 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐳𝐨𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐥

There is another type of thread called buttress thread. It combines the advantages of square and
trapezoidal threads.
The buttress threads have one disadvantage. It can
transmit power and motion only in one direction. On the
other hand, square and trapezoidal threads can transmit
force and motion in both directions.

Multiple threaded power screws

Multiple threaded power screws are used in certain applications where higher travelling speed is
required. They are also called multiple start screws such as double-start or triple-start screws.

By: Eng. Ahmed Adel 3

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 TERMINOLOGY OF POWER SCREW
The main dimensions of a double-threaded screw are shown:-
 Pitch (P) The pitch is defined as the distance measured parallel to the axis
of the screw from a point on one thread to the corresponding point on the
adjacent thread. One can define pitch as A successive distance between two
adjacent threads (P = 6 : 8 mm for square thread if not given)

 Lead (L) The lead is defined as the distance measured parallel to the axis
of the screw which the nut will advance in one revolution of the screw.
For a single-threaded screw, the lead is same as the pitch. For a double-
threaded screw, the lead is twice of the pitch, and so on.
L = nP (where n is number of start threads )
 Nominal Diameter (do) major or outer diameter is the largest
diameter of the screw. It is also called major diameter.
 Core Diameter (di) minor or inner diameter is the smallest diameter of the screw thread.
 Pitch (mean) diameter dm is the mean diameter of the screw. It is given by,
𝒅𝒐 + 𝒅𝒊 𝒑
𝒅𝒎 = = 𝒅𝒊 + 𝟐
𝟐
 Teeth thickness t : t= P/2 for square and ACME or trapezoidal thread and t = 0.75 P for buttress
thread
 Teeth width b : for square thread t = b = P/2 , do = di + 2t = di + P
 Helix Angle (α) The helix angle is defined as the angle made by the helix of the thread with a plane
perpendicular to the axis of the screw. The helix angle is related to the lead and the mean diameter of the
screw. It is also called lead angle.
Let us imagine that one thread of the screw is unwound and developed for one complete turn. This
development of the thread is illustrated ,the relationship between the helix angle, mean diameter
and lead can be expressed in the following form:

By: Eng. Ahmed Adel 4

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Torque Requirement for Lifting the load

𝑊𝑑𝑚
𝑇= tan(𝜙 + 𝛼 ) + W R 𝑐 𝜇𝑐
2
Where:
W : load required to be lifted
dm : mean (Pitch) diameter
𝟎° 𝐬𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐞
−1 𝜇
𝝓 : friction angle 𝜙 = 𝑡𝑎𝑛 𝜷 = { 𝟏𝟒. 𝟓 ° 𝑨𝑪𝑴𝑬
cos 𝜷
𝟏𝟓° 𝑻𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒆𝒛𝒐𝒊𝒅𝒂𝒍
𝝁: The coefficient of thread friction (0.1 : 0.3 if not given)
𝐿
α : Helix angle 𝛂 = 𝑡𝑎𝑛−1 where L= np
𝜋𝑑𝑚
𝑑𝑚𝑐 1 𝑑𝑜 +𝑑𝑖
Rc : mean radius for collar 𝑅𝑐 = = ( )
2 2 2 𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑟
𝝁𝒄 : coefficient of friction at the collar (0.1 : 0.3 if not given)

overall efficiency
The overall efficiency 𝜼 of the power screw is given by:
𝐓𝐨𝐫𝐪𝐮𝐞 , 𝐧𝐞𝐠𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧
𝜼=
𝐓𝐨𝐫𝐪𝐮𝐞 , 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧

𝑊𝑑𝑚
tan(𝛼)
𝜼= 2
𝑊𝑑𝑚
tan(𝜙 + 𝛼) + W R𝑐 𝜇𝑐
2

By: Eng. Ahmed Adel 5

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Design of screw and nut
There are three basic components of a power screw:
 screw
 Nut
 Frame, handle

1. Screw-Design
The body of the screw is subjected to an axial force W and torque T ,
as shown in Fig
Axial Force 𝐖 causes Direct compressive stress 𝝈𝒄
{
Torque 𝐓 causes Tosional shear stress 𝝉

We will design according to compressive stress only

and check on maximum shear stress 𝝉𝒎𝒂𝒙 < 𝝉𝒂𝒍𝒍
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Design according to compressive stress only
With matrial properties given (𝝈 , 𝝉) or selection and load W, Inner diameter (di) wich is
subjected to maxmimum stress can be determined:
𝑊
𝜎𝑐 = 𝜋
(4 𝑑𝑖2 )

For more safe-design 𝒅𝒊 = (𝟏. 𝟓: 𝟐) 𝒅𝒊

With di and pitch P (given or assumed 6:8 for square thread) thread dimensions can be calculated:
For square thread

For Trapezoidal and Acme thread

By: Eng. Ahmed Adel 6

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Check on maximum shear stress

Torsional Shear Stress

𝑑
𝑇𝑟 𝑇 𝑖 16 𝑇
𝝉= = 𝜋 24 =
𝐽 𝑑𝑖 𝜋 𝑑𝑖
3
32
16 𝑻
𝝉=
𝜋 𝑑𝑖 3
Torque calculation T

𝑊𝑑𝑚
𝑇= Tan(𝜙 + 𝛼 ) + W R 𝑐 𝜇𝑐
2
Where:
W : load required to be lifted
dm : mean (Pitch) diameter
𝟎° 𝐬𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐞
−1 𝜇
𝝓 : Friction angle 𝜙 = 𝑡𝑎𝑛 𝜷 = { 𝟏𝟒. 𝟓 ° 𝑨𝑪𝑴𝑬
cos 𝜷
𝟏𝟓° 𝑻𝒓𝒂𝒑𝒆𝒛𝒐𝒊𝒅𝒂𝒍
𝝁: The coefficient of thread friction (0.1 : 0.3 if not given)
𝐿
α : Helix angle 𝛂 = 𝑡𝑎𝑛−1 where L= np
𝜋𝑑𝑚
𝑑𝑚𝑐 1 𝑑𝑜 +𝑑𝑖
Rc : mean radius for collar 𝑅𝑐 = = ( )
2 2 2 𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑟
𝝁𝒄 : Coefficient of friction at the collar (0.1 : 0.3 if not given)

Calcultion of Direct compressive stress 𝝈𝒄 with new inner diameter di

𝑊
𝜎𝑐 = 𝜋
(4 𝑑𝑖2 )

Calcultion of maximum shear stress

𝜎 2
𝜏(𝑚𝑎𝑥) = √( 𝑐 ) + 𝜏2
2

𝜏(𝑚𝑎𝑥) 𝑚𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑏𝑒 < 𝜏𝑎𝑙𝑙

By: Eng. Ahmed Adel 7

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 2. NUT - Design
It is required to calculate:
1. Number of threads (Teeth) Z
2. The axial length of the nut h

1. Number of threads (Teeth) Z

- The transverse shear stress in the threads of the screw

With matrial properties - given ( 𝝉) or selection - load W, (di) and (t) , Z can be determined:
𝑊
𝜏(𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑤) =
𝜋 𝑑𝑖 𝑡 𝒛

- The transverse shear stress in the nut

With matrial properties - given ( 𝝉) or selection - load W, (do) and (t) , Z can be determined:
𝑊
𝜏(𝑛𝑢𝑡) =
𝜋 𝑑𝑜 𝑡 𝒛
- The bearing pressure in the nut
The bearing pressure between the contacting surfaces of the screw and the nut

𝑊
𝜎𝑏 =
𝜋 𝑑𝑚 𝑡 𝒛
Then choose the Max Z from the three values calculated
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
2. length of the nut h

h=zP where P : pitch

length h must satisfy that:
h ≥ 1.5 do where do : Outer diameter (nomoinal)

lever - Design
length of lever can be determined from torque exerted by operator : D

𝑭×𝑳=𝑻 (calculated above) F

L
Diameter d of cross section can be determined from The bending stress (neglecting shear stress):
32 𝑀
𝜎𝑏 = where M = T = F × L
𝜋 𝒅3
𝑫ൗ
𝟐
handwheel - Design F
The torque required at the rim of handwheel T
𝑫
𝑭×𝟐 =𝑻 (calculated above)

By: Eng. Ahmed Adel 8

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A machine vice, as shown has single-start, square threads with 22 mm nominal diameter and
5 mm pitch. The outer and inner diameters of the friction collar are 55 and 45 mm respectively.
The coefficients of friction for thread and collar are 0.15 and 0.17 respectively. The machinist
can comfortably exert a force of 125 N on the handle at a mean radius of 150 mm. assuming
uniform wear for the collar, calculate:
(i) The clamping force developed between the jaws.
(ii) The overall efficiency of the clamp.

Solution
For screw, do = 22 mm, n =1, p = 5 mm, 𝜇 = 0.15
For collar, do = 55 mm, di = 45 mm, 𝜇𝑐 = 0.17
For handle F = 125 N, L = 150 mm

Screw and collar friction torques

𝑑𝑚 = 𝑑𝑜 − 0.5𝑝 = 22 − 0.5(5) = 𝟏𝟗. 𝟓𝐦𝐦
𝑙 = 𝑛𝑝 = 1 × 5 = 𝟓 𝒎𝒎
𝑙 5
tan 𝛼 = = 𝜶 = 𝟒. 𝟔𝟔𝟔∘
𝜋𝑑𝑚 𝜋(19.5)
𝜇 0.15
tan 𝜙 = = = 0.15 𝝓 = 𝟖. 𝟓𝟑𝟏∘
cos 𝛽 cos 0
𝑑𝑚𝑐 1 𝑑𝑜 + 𝑑𝑖 55 + 45
𝑅𝑐 = = ( ) = = 𝟐𝟓 𝒎𝒎
2 2 2 𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑟 4

𝑊𝑑𝑚
𝑇 =𝐹×𝐿 = Tan(𝜙 + 𝛼 ) + W R 𝑐 𝜇𝑐
2
𝑾×19.5
125 × 150 = Tan(8.531 + 4.666∘ ) + 𝐖 × 25 × 0.17 ,W = 2868.6 N
2
The overall efficiency of the clamp
𝑊𝑑𝑚
tan(𝛼)
𝜼= 2 = 𝟏𝟐. 𝟏𝟖%
𝑊𝑑𝑚
tan(𝜙 + 𝛼) + W R 𝑐 𝜇𝑐
2

By: Eng. Ahmed Adel 9

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A screw clamp used on the shop fl oor is shown. The screw has single-
start square threads of 22 mm nominal diameter and 5 mm pitch. The coeffi
cient of friction at the threads and the collar is 0.15. The mean radius of the
friction collar is 15 mm. The capacity of the clamp is 750 N. The handle is
made of steel 30C8 (Syt = 400 N/mm2). It can be assumed that the operator
exerts a force of 20 N on the handle.
(i) What torque is required to tighten the clamp to full capacity?
(ii) Determine the length and the diameter of the handle such that it will
bend with a permanent set, when the rated capacity of the clamp is
exceeded.

Solution
The capacity of the clamp W = 750 N
For screw, do = 22 mm, n =1, p = 5 mm, 𝜇 = 0.15
For collar, Rc = 15 mm, 𝜇𝑐 = 0.15
For handle, 𝜎𝑦𝑡 = 400 𝑁/𝑚𝑚2 F = 20 N
Lead 𝐿 = 𝑛p = 1 × 5 = 𝟓 𝐦𝐦
Mean diameter 𝑑𝑚 = 𝑑𝑜 − 0.5p = 22 − 0.5 × 5 = 𝟏𝟗. 𝟓 𝐦𝐦
𝑡 = 0.5 𝑝 = 0.5 × 5 = 𝟐. 𝟓 𝒎𝒎
Teeth thickness
𝐿 5
Helix angle tan 𝛼 = = = 0.0816 , 𝜶 = 𝟒. 𝟔𝟔𝟔𝐨
𝜋 𝑑𝑚 𝜋(19.5)
𝜇
Friction angle tan 𝜙 = = 0.15 , 𝝓 = 𝟖. 𝟓𝟑𝐨
cos 𝛽

W𝑑𝑚
Torque T= tan(𝜙 + 𝛼) + W R 𝑐 𝜇𝑐
2
(750)(19.5)
= tan(8.53 + 4.666) + 750 × 15 × 0.15
2
= 𝟑𝟒𝟎𝟐. 𝟏 N. mm
The length of the 𝐹×𝐿 =𝑇
20 × 𝐿 = 3402.1 𝑳 = 𝟏𝟕𝟎. 𝟏 𝒎𝒎
handle
The handle will bend with a 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐧𝐭 set,
when the bending stress reaches the 𝐲𝐢𝐞𝐥𝐝 strength

32 𝑀
The Diameter of the 𝜎𝑏 =
𝜋 𝒅3
handle
32 × 3402.1
400 = 𝒅 = 𝟒. 𝟒𝟐 ≈ 𝟓 𝒎𝒎
𝜋 𝒅3

By: Eng. Ahmed Adel 10

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