Abstract: An axle assembly in portal arrangement, especially for a driven axle of low floor vehicles has an axle housing with a main drive, portal drives fixed to both sides of the axle housing, wheel end drive assemblies fixed to portal drive houses and carrying vehicle wheel rims, and wheel brakes connected to the wheel end drive assemblies. The improvement achieved by this invention is that an outlet of each portal drive (104) is connected to the vehicle wheel rims, respectively, by a hollow spindle (112) being rotatably arranged in a gear housing (109) of each wheel end drive assembly (108) by roller bearings (110, 111) with conical rollers in a pre-stressed manner.

Abstract: A driven axle assembly for a vehicle includes a center housing, suspension elements connecting the center housing to the vehicle, a main drive arranged in the center housing, side drives arranged on outer ends of the center housing, and wheel hub units connected to the side drives, respectively,, wherein a portal distance is provided between a longitudinal axis of a differential gear unit arranged in the center housing and a longitudinal axis of the wheel heads. The improvement achieved by this invention is that the suspension elements connecting the center housing to the vehicle are also attached to the housings for the drives arranged both inside and on outer ends of the center housing in an integrated manner. Therefore, the housings for the side drives, the center housing, and the suspension elements are formed as a tight compact unit.

Abstract: An expander for internal shoe drum brakes comprises involute working surfaces which are derived from mutually eccentric base circles of equal diameters. The base circles are symmetrically arranged with respect to the axis of rotation of the expander. Upon rotation of the expander the arms of the braking forces initially increase and then decrease whereby a constant relation between angular expander displacements and retarding torques can be obtained.