Elastic analysis of load distribution in wide-faced spur gears

Abstract

The load distribution across the contact line(s) of spur gears is essential for the gear designer to be able to accurately stress gears for a given application. Existing gear standards (eg BS 436, AGMA 218 DIN 3990) use a thin slice (2D) model of the meshing gear teeth to estimate the contact line load distribution. This approach clearly fails to model properly teeth subjected to mal-distributed loads, since the buttressing effect of adjacent tooth sections tends to flatten the load distribution. Non-linear tooth modifications such as crowning and some forms of lead correction are also inadequately modelled. This thesis sets out the theory for a 3D elastic model of widefaced- spur gears that has been implemented on a micro-computer. The required 3D contact line influence coefficients for standard form zero modification spur gears with 18 to 100 teeth have been determined by Finite Element analysis. These theoretical values have been compared with results from experiments carried out on a complete large module (18. Omm) wide-faced spur gear. The effect of the various elemental gear errors (eg pitch, profile, lead) and profile modifications have been investigated using the 3D computer model; the results compared with results predicted by the existing gear design standards. The existing gear standards use 2D tooth compliance values up to 50% less than those obtained in this work, largely due to inadequate modelling of the gear body compliance, which is most significant in gear wheels. Comparison of 3D tooth compliance values shows a large discrepancy between author's results again due to inadequate modelling of the gear body.