8/4/2014 Authors: M. J. Handschuh; A. Kahraman; M. R. Milliren
J. Mech. Des. 2014; 136(6):061010-061010-10.
doi: 10.1115/1.4027337
A gear designer must specify a quality level for each gear that is suitable for the application at hand. This means that the designed gear must meet all performance requirements in terms of strength, efficiency and noise within the ranges of manufacturing tolerances dictated by the quality level chosen. This study presents a set of experimental and theoretical investigations of the effect of one type of manufacturing tolerance defining tooth spacing errors on gear tooth bending strength, which dictates tooth breakage failures. A number of experiments performed by using gears having deterministic and random spacing errors are presented along with simulations to show a significant influence of spacing errors on root stresses. A methodology is proposed to relate increases in root stresses to the spacing error tolerances directly. This methodology allows determination of the stress amplification factors due to a certain range of spacing error tolerances as well as quantifying how much spacing error can be tolerated below a desired root stress limit.
(a) Measured and (b) predicted root stresses of ten consecutive teeth of a spur gear having a certain random spacing error sequence (c), revealing significant tooth-to-tooth differences in root stress amplitudes.
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