A high number of wind turbine gearboxes do not meet their expected design life, despite meeting the design criteria of current bearing, gear and wind turbine industry standards and certifications.

How difficult is it to design a gear? It depends upon whom you ask.

This paper demonstrates an application of the tooth interior fatigue fracture (TIFF) analysis method, as implemented in SMT's MASTA software, in which loaded tooth contact analysis (LTCA) results from a specialized 3-D contact model have been utilized to determine the load boundary conditions for analysis of tooth flank fracture (TFF).

There's no substitute for a good software package in gear manufacturing. It's a critical shop floor tool that provides practical engineering services that customers appreciate. When you're in the business of specifying and procuring high quality gears, the software needs to meet many objectives including the consideration of all tolerances of center distance, tooth thickness and tip diameters, root diameters, fillets, etc. It's also imperative that the software updates include the latest revisions to the gear standards being used in the industry.

Over the last 15 years, there has been significant growth in the number of transmission types as well as their complexity: manual, conventional automatic, dual clutch, automated manual, continuously variable, split power and pure EV transmissions.

Developed here is a new method to automatically find the optimal topological modification from the predetermined measurement grid points for bevel gears. Employing this method enables the duplication of any flank form of a bevel gear given by the measurement points and the creation of a 3-D model for CAM machining in a very short time. This method not only allows the user to model existing flank forms into 3-D models, but also can be applied for various other purposes, such as compensating for hardening distortions and manufacturing deviations which are very important issues but not yet solved in the practical milling process.

So there is little chance that they need the same software to assist with their work. Gone are the days when companies wrote their own code and process engineers thumbed the same tattered reference book.

Multiple CAM initiatives at Snyder Industries are improving safety, quality and productivity for parts ranging from 50 to 5,000 lbs.

Examining the history of software in mechanical engineering

Light-weight construction and consideration of available resources result in gearbox designs with high load capacity and power density. At the same time, expectations for gear reliability are high. Additionally, there is a diversity of planetary gears for different applications.