Service performance and load carrying capacity of bevel gears strongly depend on the size and position of the contact pattern. To provide an optimal contact pattern even under load, the gear design has to consider the relative displacements caused by deflections or thermal expansions expected under service conditions. That means that more or less lengthwise and heightwise crowning has to be applied on the bevel gear teeth.

Recently it has been suggested that the transverse plane may be very useful in studying the kinematics and dynamics of spiral bevel gears. The transverse plane is perpendicular to the pitch and axial planes as shown in Fig. 1. Buckingham has suggested that a spiral bevel gear may be viewed as a limited form of a "stepped" straight-tooth gear as in Fig. 2. The transverse plane is customarily used in the study of straight toothed bevel gears.

Transmission of power between nonparallel shafts is inherently more difficult than transmission between parallel shafts, but is justified when it saves space and results in more compact, more balanced designs. Where axial space is limited compared to radial space, angular drives are preferred despite their higher initial cost. For this reason, angular gear motors and worm gear drives are used extensively in preference to parallel shaft drives, particularly where couplings, brakes, and adjustable mountings add to the axial space problem of parallel shaft speed reducers.

Spiral-bevel gears, found in many machine tools, automobile rear-axle drives, and helicopter transmissions, are important elements for transmitting power.

The manufacturing quality of spiral bevel gears has achieved a very high standard. Nevertheless, the understanding of the real stress conditions and the influences. of certain parameters is not satisfactory.

The development of a new gear strength computer program based upon the finite element method, provides a better way to calculate stresses in bevel and hypoid gear teeth. The program incorporates tooth surface geometry and axle deflection data to establish a direct relationship between fillet bending stress, subsurface shear stress, and applied gear torque. Using existing software links to other gear analysis programs allows the gear engineer to evaluate the strength performance of existing and new gear designs as a function of tooth contact pattern shape, position and axle deflection characteristics. This approach provides a better understanding of how gears react under load to subtle changes in the appearance of the no load tooth contact pattern.

Selection of the number of teeth for each gear in a gear train such that the output to input angular velocity ratio is a specified value is a problem considered by relatively few published works on gear design.

A recent U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Command project, conducted by Battelle's Columbus Laboratories. successfully developed the methodology of CAD/CAM procedures for manufacturing dies (via EDM) for forging spiral bevel gears. Further, it demonstrated that precision forging of spiral bevel gears is a practical production technique. Although no detailed economic evaluation was made in this study, it is expected that precision forging offers an attractive alternative to the costly gear cutting operations for producing spiral bevel gears.