Optimizing Fitness Equipment Performance with IoT: A Case Study of Life Fitness
Technology Category
- Sensors - Haptic Sensors
- Sensors - Infrared Sensors
Applicable Industries
- Chemicals
- Equipment & Machinery
Applicable Functions
- Facility Management
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Onsite Human Safety Management
- Visual Quality Detection
Services
- Testing & Certification
- Training
About The Customer
Life Fitness is a world leader in the development and manufacturing of advanced fitness equipment for both the home market and industry-tailored solutions for fitness facilities and training centers. Their commercial product lines include Life Fitness Cardio, Life Fitness Strength, and Hammer Strength equipment, which are used by professional and college athletes for training. Life Fitness also produces consumer cardio and strength equipment aimed at home exercise programs. The company holds more than 50 U.S. patents and is known for its performance features that have led the way in the fitness industry. Their products are designed to facilitate the muscular effort and exercise required to develop strength, speed, agility, range of motion, and endurance in athletes and people everywhere.
The Challenge
Life Fitness, a global leader in fitness equipment manufacturing, faced a significant challenge in ensuring the reliability and safety of their cardiovascular and strength equipment. The equipment extensively uses cylindrical bushings and plain bearings to transmit high radial loads from a rotating shaft to a support structure. To meet reliability goals, it was crucial to accurately determine the contact pressures between the bushing and shaft to ensure that bushing wear rates were within acceptable limits. Traditional methods, such as bushing catalogs and Hertzian formulas, were used to predict these pressures. However, these methods failed to account for axial misalignment between the shaft and bushing, which could lead to extremely high nonuniform pressure distributions, making it difficult to ensure the longevity and safety of the equipment.
The Solution
To overcome this challenge, Life Fitness employed ANSYS Mechanical software. Unlike conventional FEA codes, ANSYS's surface-to-surface contact element technology automatically detects regions where parts touch and uses higher-order elements that do not require nodes of contacting parts to line up. This technology readily handles solutions of numerically difficult contact problems, saving considerable time and effort. Specifically, TARGE170 and CONTA174 elements were used to simulate three-dimensional contact between the shaft and bushing. This approach greatly improved the detection of initial contact and allowed engineers to quickly and accurately determine the contact pressure due to axial misalignment between the shaft and bushing.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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