Simulation of contact forces and contact characteristics during meshing of elastic beveloid gears

Abstract

Beveloid gears, also known as conical involute gears with very complex tooth shapes, gain more and more importance in industrial practice due to their ability to realize gear stages with crossed axes. This is why they are frequently found in power transmissions. The most familiar application of beveloid gears is the reduction gear used in marine transmissions, but in the last few years they have also been used increasingly often in the automotive industry. In the last decade many studies on beveloid gears were published, however, the meshing between teeth and the contact characteristics during meshing of beveloid gears still have not been studied in detail using fully elastic models. In this work, the fully elastic multibody approach will be applied to study contact forces and contact characteristics including contact patterns during meshing of straight beveloid gears. To validate the fully elastic approach, simulation results of a beveloid gear pair by finite element method and by the fully elastic multibody system are compared. The comparison shows very good agreement.