This article also appears as Chapter 1 in the Gleason Corporation publication "Advanced Bevel Gear Technology." Gearing Principles in Cylindrical and Straight Bevel Gears The purpose of gears is to transmit motion and torque from one shaft to another. That transmission normally has to occur with a constant ratio, the lowest possible disturbances and the highest possible efficiency. Tooth profile, length and shape are derived from those requirements.

In a modern truck, the gear teeth are among the most stressed parts. Failure of a tooth will damage the transmission severely. Throughout the years, gear design experience has been gained and collected into standards such as DIN (Ref. 1) or AGMA (Ref. 2). Traditionally two types of failures are considered in gear design: tooth root bending fatigue, and contact fatigue. The demands for lighter and more silent transmissions have given birth to new failure types. One novel failure type, Tooth Interior Fatigue Fracture (TIFF), has previously been described by MackAldener and Olsson (Refs. 3 & 4) and is further explored in this paper.

Designers are constantly searching for ways to reduce rotocraft drive system weight. Reduced weight can increase the payload, performance, or power density of current and future systems. One example of helicopter transmission weight reduction was initiated as part of the United States Army Advanced Rotocraft Transmission program. This example used a split-torque, face-gear configuration concept (Ref. 1). compared to a conventional design with spiral-bevel gears, the split-torque, face-gear design showed substantial weight savings benefits. Also, the use of face gears allows a wide-range of possible configurations with technical and economic benefits (Ref. 2).

Noncircular gearing is not new. There are well-documented articles covering standard and high order elliptical gears, sinusoidal gears, logarithmic spiral gears, and circular gears mounted eccentrically. What these designs have in common is a pitch curve defined by a mathematical function. This article will cover noncircular gearing with free-form pitch curves, which, of course, includes all the aforementioned functions. This article also goes into the generation of teeth on the pitch curve, which is not usually covered in the technical literature. Needless to say, all this is possible only with the help of a computer.

In general, bevel gears and curvic couplings are completely different elements. Bevel gears rotate on nonintersecting axis with a ratio based on the number of teeth. Curvic couplings work like a clutch (Fig. 1).

This article offers an overview of the practical design of a naval gear for combined diesel or gas turbine propulsion (CODOG type). The vibration performance of the gear is tested in a back-to-back test. The gear presented is a low noise design for the Royal Dutch Navy's LCF Frigate. The design aspects for low noise operation were incorporated into the overall gear system design. Therefore, special attention was paid to all the parameters that could influence the noise and vibration performance of the gearbox. These design aspects, such as tooth corrections, tooth loading, gear layout, balance, lubrication and resilient mounting, will be discussed.

Plastic gears and transmissions require a different design approach than metal transmissions. Different tools are available to the plastic transmission designer for optimizing his geared product, and different requirements exist for inspection and testing. This paper will present some of the new technology available to the plastic gear user, including design, mold construction, inspection, and testing of plastic gears and transmissions.

The quality of the material used for highly loaded critical gears is of primary importance in the achievement of their full potential. Unfortunately, the role which material defects play is not clearly understood by many gear designers. The mechanism by which failures occur due to material defects is often circuitous and not readily apparent. In general, however, failures associated with material defects show characteristics that point to the source of the underlying problem, the mechanism by which the failure initiated, and the manner in which it progressed to failure of the component.

Helical gear pairs with narrow face width can be theoretically classified into three categories over the contact ration domain whose abscissa is the transverse contact ration and whose ordinate is the overlap contact ratio. There is a direct relation between vibration magnitude and shaft parallelism deviation. To clarify the effect of the tooth deviation types on the vibration behavior of helical gear pairs, performance diagrams on vibration are introduced. the acceleration levels of gear pairs are shown by contour lines on the contact ratio domain. Finally, the performance of gears with bias-in and bias-out modifications is discussed considering the effect of the shaft parallelism deviation with use of the developed simulator on a helical gear unit. It becomes clear that there is an asymmetrical feature on the relation between the vibration magnitude of a gear pair and the direction of each deviation.

Designing a gear set implies a considerable effort in the determination of the geometry that fulfills the requirements of load capacity, reliability, durability, size, etc. When the objective is to design a new set of gears, there are many alternatives for the design, and the designer has the freedom to choose among them. Reverse engineering implies an even bigger challenge to the designer, because the problem involves already manufactured gears whose geometry is generally unknown. In this case, the designer needs to know the exact geometry of the actual gears in order to have a reference for the design.