November 1-3. SME Gear Processing and Manufacturing Clinic, Sheraton Meridian, Indianapolis, IN.
November 5-10. international Conference on Gearing, Zhengzhou, China
The concept of "transmission error" is relatively new and stems from research work in the late 1950s by Gregory, Harris and Munro,(1) together with the need to check the accuracy of gear cutting machines. The corresponding commercial "single flank" testing equipment became available in the 1960s, but it was not until about ten years ago that it became generally used, and only recently has it been possible to test reliably at full load and full speed.
Computer programs have been developed to completely design spur and helical gear shaper cutters starting from the specifications of the gear to be cut and the type of gear shaper to be used. The programs generate the working drawing of the cutter and, through the use of a precision plotter, generate enlarge scaled layouts of the gear as produced by the cutter and any other layouts needed for its manufacture.
A much-used method for checking the tooth thickness of an involute gear tooth is to measure the dimension over two balls placed in most nearly opposite spaces in the case of external gears, and the dimension between the balls in the case of internal gears. This measurement is then checked against a pre-calculated dimension to denote an acceptable part.
The modern day requirement for
precision finished hobbed gears, coupled
with the high accuracy characteristics of
modern CNC hobbing machines, demands high tool accuracy.
For the last few years, the market has been tough for the U.S. gear industry. That statement will cause no one any surprise. The debate is about what to do. One sure sign of this is the enormous attention Congress and the federal government are now placing on "competitiveness."
Joe Arvin comments on his recent trip to Scandinavia and how U.S. defense dollars are being spent overseas. J.D. Smith responds to an article on gear noise from the previous issue.
Rotary gear honing is a hard gear finishing process that was developed to improve the sound characteristics of
hardened gears by: Removing nicks and burrs; improving surface finish; and making minor corrections in tooth irregularities caused by heat-treat distortion.
In the design of any new gear drive, the performance of previous similar designs is very carefully considered. In the course of evaluating one such new design, the authors were faced with the task of comparing it with two similar existing systems, both of which were operating quite successfully. A problem arose, however, when it was realized that the bending stress levels of the two baselines differed substantially. In order to investigate these differences and realistically compare them to the proposed new design, a three-dimensional finite-element method (FEM) approach was applied to all three gears.
Gears are currently run at high speed and under high load. It is a significant problem to develop lubricants and gears with high load-carrying capacity against scoring. The particles of molybdenum disulfide have been considered to increase the scoring resistance of the gears. The wear characteristics and the scoring resistance of the gears lubricated with MoS2 paste and MoS2 powder have been investigated. (1) However, there are few investigations on the performance of the gears coated with MoS2 film with respect to scoring.