Conceptual Design of Gear Differentials for Automotive Vehicles

An automotive gear differential is a joint-fractionated planetary gear train with two degrees-of-freedom. We summarize the characteristics of planetary gear trains and the design constraints of noncoupled automotive gear differentials to synthesize their corresponding kinematic graphs. Based on these graphs and the proposed respecializing process, we generate the atlas of design concepts for automotive gear differentials with any types of gear pairs. As a result, there are 4, 25, and 156 design concepts for five-, six-, and seven-bar automotive gear differentials, respectively.