After shaping or hobbing, the tooth flanks must be either chamfered or duburred. Here it is paramount that the secondary burr produced will not be formed into the flank, but to the face of the gear, because during hardening, the secondary burr will straighten up and, due to its extreme hardness, will lead to excessive tool wear.

The phenomenon of white layers, which arises from high stress, can be observed under a microscope after the white layers have been treated with a weak nitric acid solution. Their occurrences in zones of high shear stress can provide qualitatively valuable indications of the size and direction of the stress, and they can point out possible starting points for flank damage. An investigation of this phenomenon is described.

Profitable hard machining of tooth flanks in mass production has now become possible thanks to a number of newly developed production methods. As used so far, the advantages of hard machining over green shaving or rolling are the elaborately modified tooth flanks are produced with a scatter of close manufacturing tolerances. Apart from an increase of load capacity, the chief aim is to solve the complex problem of reducing the noise generation by load-conditioned kinematic modifications of the tooth mesh. In Part II, we shall deal with operating sequences and machining results and with gear noise problems.

This article deals with certain item to be taken into consideration for gear grinding, common problems that arise in gear grinding and their solutions. The discussion will be limited to jobbing or low-batch production environments, where experimental setup and testing is not possible for economic and other reasons.

Since size and efficiency are increasingly important considerations in modern machinery, the trend is gear design is to use planetary gearing instead of worm gearing and multi-stage gear boxes. Internal gearing is an important part of most of planetary gear assemblies. In external gearing, if the gears are standard (of no-modified addenda), interference rarely happens. But in an internal gearing, especially in some new types of planetary gears, such as the KHV planetary, the Y planetary, etc., (1) various types of interference may occur. Therefore, avoiding interference is of significance for the design of internal gearing.

In the lubrication and cooling of gear teeth a variety of oil jet lubrication schemes is sometimes used. A method commonly used is a low pressure, low velocity oil jet directed at the ingoing mesh of the gears, as was analyzed in Reference 1. Sometimes an oil jet is directed at the outgoing mesh at low pressures. It was shown in Reference 2 that the out-of-mesh lubrication method provides a minimal impingement depth and low cooling of the gears because of the short fling-off time and fling-off angle.(3) In References 4 and 5 it was shown that a radially directed oil jet near the out-of-mesh position with the right oil pressure was the method that provided the best impingement depth.

Hobbing is a continuous gear generation process widely used in the industry for high or low volume production of external cylindrical gears. Depending on the tooth size, gears and splines are hobbed in a single pass or in a two-pass cycle consisting of a roughing cut followed by a finishing cut. State-of-the-art hobbing machines have the capability to vary cutting parameters between first and second cut so that a different formula is used to calculate cycle times for single-cut and double-cut hobbing.

The first part of this article describes the analytical design method developed by the author to evaluate the load capacity of worm gears. The second part gives a short description of the experimental program and testing resources being used at CETIM to check the basic assumptions of the analytical method; and to determine on gears and test wheels the surface pressure endurance limits of materials that can be used for worm gears. The end of the article compares the results yielded by direct application of the method and test results.

One of the most frequently neglected areas of gear design is the determination of "form diameter". Form diameter is that diameter which specifies the transition point between the usable involute profile and the fillet of the tooth. Defining this point is important to prevent interference with the tip of the mating gear teeth and to enable proper preshave machining when the gear is to be finished with a shaving operation.

The purpose of this article is to describe an analytical method free of the drawbacks mentioned above and providing absolutely reliable results.