Geometry design, meshing analysis and error influences of face-hobbed cycloidal bevel gears with double circular-arc profile for a nutation drive

As the core components of nutation drive, the internal meshing pair of bevel gear must be delicately designed to achieve desirable operational performances for the transmission device. For this purpose, this paper designs a face-hobbed internal meshing pair of cycloidal bevel gears with double circular-arc profile (DCAP). First, a cutter head with DCAP cutting edges is designed to generate the tooth surface of internal gear pair. Then, the tooth geometry of the external and internal bevel gears are derived according to the meshing theory. Finally, a finite element model is developed to simulate the meshing characteristics of the gear pair. The simulation results reveal that the proposed face-hobbed cycloidal bevel gear pair with DCAP has higher contact/bending strength, better load sharing and smaller transmission error compared with the logarithmic spiral bevel gear pair with DCAP. The effects of four typical manufacturing errors on meshing characteristics of the proposed bevel gear pair are investigated to provide fundamental references for the tolerance design of cycloidal bevel gears.