Energy efficiency produces multiple well-known benefits, including reduced energy costs to end users, but also universal societal benefits of price suppression in energy markets, avoided electric transmission and generating plant costs, and reduced emissions. Because of these well-known benefits, energy efficiency is increasingly utilized as a resource to meet society’s energy needs. The energy-efficiency resource is often procured through utility or government-run energy-efficiency programs. Increasing energy savings requirements of these programs are producing a need for new ways to achieve energy efficiency.

Consider then, the cogged v belt. V belt drives are commonly used to transfer power from electric motors to a wide variety of applications. The energy efficiency benefits of cogged v belts over smooth v belts have been presented in various publications since the 1990s and the transition to cogged v belts is recommended by many organizations including the U.S Dept. of Energy.

Thus, a question must be asked: “Why are smooth v belts still used instead of its more efficient alternative, cogged v belts?” One of several factors is that efficiency programs don’t currently focus on incentivizing energy savings from cogged v belts. Most efficiency program administrators agree with the published literature on benefits of this measure and allow it through their custom programs. Custom programs however, require the end user to fill out forms with energy savings calculations. This is time consuming and likely results in reduced participation from end users who purchase v belts. Deemed savings for cogged v belts would allow prescriptive or up-stream efficiency programs to be designed to promote cogged v belts, easing the burden on the end user to participate in programs. However, until the publishing of this article, savings for cogged v belts has always been calculated on a custom basis for each application, and has been based on the associated motor horsepower. This article develops deemed power savings for cogged v belts of different profiles and lengths, without the need to know the customer’s associated motor horsepower.

To develop these deemed power savings, this article references previous publications and describes the different belt losses and benefits of cogged v belts. It then outlines a methodology to associate motor size to a given v belt profile and length based on guidelines by the Rubber Manufacturers Association (RMA) and the Mechanical Power Transmission Association (MPTA). Finally, the article presents tables for standard v belt cross sections and lengths with the calculated power associated with each belt and the corresponding deemed power savings from installing cogged v belts. With this information, efficiency programs could transform the belt industry by developing up-stream efficiency programs, perhaps similar to the point-of-sales programs for CFLs or LEDs.

This article comes from tandfonline edit released