Non-Contact Measurement of Spiral Bevel Gears Using the Laser Profiler on the Five-Axis Machine

Abstract Nowadays, the measuring machines for gears, such as the P series of Klingelnberg and the GMS series of Gleason, are all four-axis structures. They have a three-dimensional contact scanning probe system and high measurement accuracy. This measurement has two main disadvantages: (1) it is time-consuming, and (2) difficult to measure small-size gears with less than a 0.5 mm module. Due to the above drawbacks, non-contact measurement has become more popular recently. This research aims to develop a non-contact measurement system of spiral bevel gears using a laser profiler. We establish the coordinate systems of the measuring machine. This machine has five axes, four for measuring movement and one for the orientation of the laser profiler. The five coordinates of pitch and tooth flank measurements are derived according to theoretical gear flank points. The NC codes are programmed for measuring the pitch and tooth flank of bevel gears according to those coordinates. After that, we propose a method based on DIN 3965-2 to evaluate the pitch and tooth flank errors. Here, a double-rotary-table type five-axis machine is adopted as an experiment machine. The results are compared to the report of the Klingelnberg P40 gear measuring center. Their pitch and the maximum tooth flank deviations are within 0.004 and 0.05 mm, respectively. Those results verify the correctness of the proposed method.