‘Rugged, lightweight, compact’: Bauer Gear Motors in the automation market

Earlier this month, Bauer Gear Motor was one of several Altra Motion brands present at Automate 2022 – the largest automation and robotics trade show in North America.

Representing Bauer Gear Motor was Business Development Manager Mike Stegmann.

With 24 years of rotary and linear power transmission experience, Mike has spent the last 14 years of his career at Altra. He studied mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech and holds an MBA from Hofstra University.

During the show, Stegmann explained the role of Bauer products in the automation market.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What Bauer Gear Motor products did you bring to Automate?

MS: We have a right-angle (helical gearmotor), and an inline helical gearmotor. … These are high-efficiency products. They’re very compact and very lightweight. So, you can pick up these products in the palm of your hands, and they can generate quite a bit of torque. These are products that we sell day in and day out, out of our Charlotte, N.C. facility.

We have a lot of capability with our motors. It’s not only the standard AC synchronous motors, but we also have permanent magnet synchronous motors as well. The advantage with the permanent magnets, that we can insert into any one of these designs, is that we can get the full torque of the product with virtually zero speed.

And then you have a whole bunch of different types of mounting styles. So it's a full spectrum of product offering, with all the capabilities and mounting configurations that you might want.

Q: Bauer’s known for the gear motor … how does that apply to robotics?

MS: Right, a fully-integrated gear motor. They’re known for their rugged design, a high-efficiency product. But this is a light-weight aluminum design that we’re showing here. Because we’re thinking compact, which is generally what this show’s about.

… But these products scale up to very large sizes. We can do 150,000 in. lbs. of torque out of these products. So you're getting into fairly large sizes. Like, in excess of 100 HP.

So from small sizes like this that fit on a tabletop, up to larger sizes that are used in more industrial applications – steel work, automotive – anything that needs that robust type of product.

Q: How have changes and innovations in this market changed what you do?

MS: I think what we do is look at different trends out there. And we look for opportunities to develop new products, or to integrate the products into a customer’s application. We like to work hand in hand with an OEM in designing the product, with their engineering team. That’s something that we specialize in, on all of our brands. We’re doing a lot of custom applications.

Learn more about Bauer’s inline helical and right-angle gearmotors:

Product Overview: Drive Solutions with Bauer Geared Motors