AGMA 18FTM21 PDF

The application of non-contact metrology allows a very fast collection of points on the measured gear tooth surfaces with data rates that can be as higher as millions of points per second. This new technology provides a wealth of information about the gears that can be applied for the traditional quality assessment of the gears or, as proposed here, for reverse engineering, noise root cause analysis, or as a baseline stress information for further gear design optimization. In this regard, the authors’ approach on integrating non-contact metrology in the process of analysis and simulation of gear drives will be presented in this paper. The point-clouds will be obtained as the result of the application of non-contact metrology machines. Then, gear tooth surfaces will be regenerated into their analytical form by using non-uniform rational basis spline surfaces (NURBS) and solid models of the scanned gears developed. Tooth contact analysis and finite element analysis will be performed for two different versions of cylindrical helical gears considering their mesh with a master gear and the obtained results compared. The influence of the grid size used for regeneration of the gear tooth surfaces on the obtained results will be studied, and the applicability of reverse engineering of gear design parameters shown.