New developments in the design and generation of gear drives

Design, generation and simulation of the meshing and contact of gear drives with favourable bearing contact and reduced noise are considered. The proposed approach is based on replacement of the instantaneous line of contact of tooth surfaces by point contact and on application of a predesigned parabolic function of transmission errors that is able to absorb linear discontinuous functions of transmission errors caused by misalignment. Basic algorithms for analysis and synthesis of gear drives are presented. The developed theory is applied for design and generation of the following gear drives with modified geometry: (a) spur and helical gears, (b) a new version of Novikov-Wildhaber (N-W) helical gears, (c) asymmetric face gear drives with a spur pinion, (d) formate-cut spiral bevel gears. Generation of the tooth surface of a worm gear is presented as the formation of a two-branch envelope. The discussed topics are illustrated with examples.