Design of face-hobbed spiral bevel gears with reduced maximum tooth contact pressure and transmission errors

The aim of this study is to define optimal tooth modifications, introduced by appropriately chosen head-cutter geometry and machine tool setting, to simultaneously minimize tooth contact pressure and angular displacement error of the driven gear (transmission error) of face-hobbed spiral bevel gears. As a result of these modifications, the gear pair becomes mismatched, and a point contact replaces the theoretical line contact. In the applied loaded tooth contact analysis it is assumed that the point contact under load is spreading over a surface along the whole or part of the “potential” contact line. A computer program was developed to implement the formulation provided above. By using this program the influence of tooth modifications introduced by the variation in machine tool settings and in head cutter data on load and pressure distributions, transmission errors, and fillet stresses is investigated and discussed. The correlation between the ease-off obtained by pinion tooth modifications and the corresponding tooth contact pressure distribution is investigated and the obtained results are presented.