Almost all machines or mechanical systems contain precision contact elements such as bearings, cams, rears, shafts, splines and rollers. These components have two important common requirements: first, they must possess sufficient mechanical properties, such as, high hardness, fatigue strength and wear resistance to maximize their performance and life; second, they must be finished to close dimensional tolerances to minimize noise, vibration and fatigue loading.
A much-used method for checking the tooth thickness of an involute gear tooth is to measure the dimension over two balls placed in most nearly opposite spaces in the case of external gears, and the dimension between the balls in the case of internal gears. This measurement is then checked against a pre-calculated dimension to denote an acceptable part.
Throughout the history of civilization attempts have been made to limit the number of the measuring systems in use with the result that today only two systems, English and metric, are practiced in the industrial nations. Globally, the metric system has been gaining ground, and the English system has been losing it. As of 1986, only the United States, Burma and Brunei remain uncommitted to metric conversion in the sense that no government controlled deadlines for the conversion have been established.
The first commandment for gears reads "Gears must have backlash!" When gear teeth are operated without adequate
backlash, any of several problems may occur, some of which may lead to disaster. As the teeth try to force their way through mesh, excessive separating forces are created which
may cause bearing failures. These same forces also produce a wedging action between the teeth with resulting high loads on the teeth. Such loads often lead to pitting and to other failures related to surface fatigue, and in some cases, bending failures.
The modern day requirement for
precision finished hobbed gears, coupled
with the high accuracy characteristics of
modern CNC hobbing machines, demands high tool accuracy.
The last decade has been a period of
far-reaching change for the metal working industry. The effect of higher lubricant costs, technical advances in machine design and increasing competition are making it essential that manufacturers of gears pay more attention to testing, selecting and controlling cutting fluid systems. Lubricant costs are not a large
percentage of the process cost relative to items such as raw materials, equipment and labor, and this small relative cost has tended to reduce the economic incentive to evaluate and to change cutting fluids.
A pair of spur gears generally has an effective lead error which is caused, not only by manufacturing and assembling errors, but also by the deformations of shafts, bearings and housings due to the transmitted load. The longitudinal load distribution on a contact line of the teeth of the gears is not uniform because of the effective lead error.
Circular arc helical gears have been proposed by Wildhaber and Novikov (Wildhaber-Novikov gears). These types of gears became very popular in the sixties, and many authors in Russia, Germany, Japan and the People's Republic of China made valuable contributions to this area. The history of their researches can be the subject of a special investigation, and the authors understand that their references cover only a very small part of the bibliography on this topic.
The higher load carrying capacities, compact dimensions and longer life of hardened gears is an accepted fact in industry today. However, the costs involved in case hardening and subsequent finishing operations to achieve these advantages are considerable. For example, in order to achieve desired running properties on larger gears, it has been necessary to grind the tooth flanks. This costly operation can now be replaced, in many cases, by a new Hard Cutting (HC)
process which permits the cutting of hardened gears while maintaining extremely low tooling costs.
In ParI 1 several scuffing (scoring) criteria were shown ultimately to converge into one criterion, the original flash temperature criterion according to Blok. In Part 2 it will be shown that all geometric influences may be concentrated in one factor dependent on only four independent parameters, of which the gear ratio, the number of teeth of the pinion, and the addendum modification coefficient of the pinion are significant.