Reverse Engineering of Machine-tool Settings with Modified Roll for Spiral Bevel Pinions

Although a great deal of research has been dedicated to the synthesis of spiral bevel gears, little related to reverse engineering can be found. An approach is proposed to reverse the machine-tool settings of the pinion of a spiral bevel gear drive on the basis of the blank and tooth surface data obtained by a coordinate measuring machine(CMM). Real tooth contact analysis(RTCA) is performed to preliminary ascertain the contact pattern, the motion curve, as well as the position of the mean contact point. And then the tangent to the contact path and the motion curve are interpolated in the sense of the least square method to extract the initial values of the bias angle and the higher order coefficients(HOC) in modified roll motion. A trial tooth surface is generated by machine-tool settings derived from the local synthesis relating to the initial meshing performances and modified roll motion. An optimization objective is formed which equals the tooth surface deviation between the real tooth surface and the trial tooth surface. The design variables are the parameters describing the meshing performances at the mean contact point in addition to the HOC. When the objective is optimized within an arbitrarily given convergence tolerance, the machine-tool settings together with the HOC are obtained. The proposed approach is verified by a spiral bevel pinion used in the accessory gear box of an aviation engine. The trial tooth surfaces approach to the real tooth surface on the whole in the example. The results show that the convergent tooth surface deviation for the concave side on the average is less than 0.5 μm, and is less than 1.3 μm for the convex side. The biggest tooth surface deviation is 6.7 μm which is located at the corner of the grid on the convex side. Those nodes with relative bigger tooth surface deviations are all located at the boundary of the grid. An approach is proposed to figure out the machine-tool settings of a spiral bevel pinion by way of reverse engineering without having known the theoretical tooth surfaces and the corresponding machine-tool settings.

Design and analysis of spiral bevel gears with seventh-order function of transmission error

This paper proposes a new approach to mial function of transmission error （TE） for spiral design and implement a seventh-order polyno- bevel gears with an aim to reduce the running vibration and noise of gear drive and improve the loaded distribution of the tooth. Based on the constraint conditions of predesigned seventh-order polynomial function curve and the theory of linear algebra, the polynomial coefficients of the seventh-order polynomial function of transmission error can be obtained. By applying a method named reverse tooth contact analysis, the modified roll coefficients as well as parts of machine-tool settings for the face-milling of spiral bevel gears can be individually determined. Therefore, a predesigned seventh-order polynomial function of transmission error for spiral bevel gears can be obtained by the modified roll with high-order coef- ficients, and comparisons of the seventh-order polynomial and parabolic functions of transmission error are also performed. The achievement of spiral bevel gears with the seventh-order function of transmission error can be accomplished on a universal Cartesian-type hypoid gear generator or a numerically controlled cradle-style hypoid gear generator due to its simple generating motion of axes of the cradle and the work piece. The results of a numerical example show that the bending stresses of the tooth of seventh-order are less than those of a parabolic one, while the contact stresses remain almost eouivalent.