A major source of helicopter cabin noise (which has been measured at over 100 decibels sound pressure level) is the gearbox. Reduction of this noise is a NASA and U.S. Army goal. A requirement for the Army/NASA Advanced Rotorcraft Transmission project was a 10 dB noise reduction compared to current designs.
Long-time readers of these pages will know that I have always felt strongly about the subject of professional education. There's nothing more important for an individual's career development than keeping up with current technology. likewise, there's nothing more important that a company can do for itself and it employees than seeing to it they have the professional education they need. Giving people the educational tools they need to do their jobs is a necessary ingredient for success.
Following is the second part of an article begun in our last issue. The first part covered basic shot peening theory, shot peening controls, and considerations that should go into developing a shot peening specification. Part II covers optional peening methods and the relationship of shot peening specifications to the drawings.
Shot peening is widely recognized as a prove, cost-effective process to enhance the fatigue characteristics of metal parts and eliminate the problems of stress corrosion cracking. Additional benefits accrue in the areas of forming and texturizing. Though shot peening is widely used today, the means of specifying process parameters and controlling documents for process control are not widely understood. Questions regarding shot size, intensity, and blueprint specification to assure a high quality and repeatable shot peening process are continually asked by many design and materials engineers.
This article should answer many of the questions frequently asked by engineering professionals and to further assist companies interested in establishing a general shot peening specification.
Consisting of only a ring gear b meshing with one or two planets a, a carrier H and an equal velocity mechanism V, a KHV gearing(Fig. 1) is compact in structure, small in size and capable of providing a large speed ratio. For a single stage, its speed ratio can reach up to 200, and its size is approximately 1/4 that of a conventional multi-stage gear box.
In the design of any new gear drive, the performance of previous similar designs is very carefully considered. In the course of evaluating one such new design, the authors were faced with the task of comparing it with two similar existing systems, both of which were operating quite successfully. A problem arose, however, when it was realized that the bending stress levels of the two baselines differed substantially. In order to investigate these differences and realistically compare them to the proposed new design, a three-dimensional finite-element method (FEM) approach was applied to all three gears.