Gear evaluation deviations-based crucial geometric error identification of five-axis CNC gear form grinding process

The gear form grinding accuracy is significantly affected by crucial geometric errors. The gear form grinding process is a special line contact forming method. There are exclusive evaluation standards for gear grinding accuracy. While the existing sensitivity analysis for spatial point errors cannot meet the final gear report requirements. Hence, a novel method for analysis of geometric error influence on the key gear evaluation deviations (GED) is proposed. First, the actual digital tooth surface considering geometric errors and gear form grinding mechanism was constructed according to the homogeneous transformation matrix (HTM) and multi-body system theory (MBS). Second, the GED of the digital tooth surface was gained according to the modified gear meshing equations. Third, the analytic mapping relationship between the GED and machine tool geometric errors was first established. Then, the crucial geometric errors affecting the GED were identified based on a proposed Morris method. Finally, the identification results were compared to the existing publications, and the compensation discussions of crucial errors were demonstrated to validate the advantages of the proposed method. It can be found that the compensation results of GED-oriented key errors are better than those of the traditional methods, which is beneficial to the improvement of evaluation reports.