.jpg)
Historical
AGMA 901-A92 (R2015)
A Rational Procedure for the Preliminary Design of Minimum Volume Gears
Gear design is a process of synthesis where gear geometry, materials, heat treatment, manufacturing methods, and lubrication are selected to meet the performance requirements of a given application. The designer must design the gearset with adequate pitting resistance, bending strength, and scuffing resistance to transmit the required power for the design life. With the algorithm presented here, one can select materials and heat treatment within the economic constraints and limitations of manufacturing facilities, and select the gear geometry to satisfy constraints on weight, size and configuration. The gear designer can minimize noise level and operating temperature by minimizing the pitchline velocity and sliding velocity. This is done by specifying high gear accuracy and selecting material strengths consistent with maximum material hardness, to obtain minimum volume gearsets with teeth no larger than necessary to balance the pitting resistance and bending strength. Gear design is not the same as gear analysis. Existing gearsets can only be analyzed, not designed. While design is more challenging than analysis, current textbooks do not provide procedures for designing minimum volume gears. They usually recommend that the number of teeth in the pinion be chosen based solely on avoiding undercut. This information sheet, based on the work of R. Errichello [1], will show why this practice, or any procedure which arbitrarily selects the number of pinion teeth, will not necessarily result in minimum volume gearsets. Although there have been many technical papers on gear design (for example [2] and [3]), most advocate using computer-based search algorithms which are unnecessary. Tucker [4] came the closest to an efficient algorithm, but he did not show how to find the preferred number of teeth for the pinion. This information sheet includes the design of spur and helical gears. Other gear types could be designed by a similar algorithm with some slight modifications to the one presented here.
Content Provider
American Gear Manufacturers Association [agma]
