Gear Design for maximum fatigue life- Papers and Texts?

[Kurt61342]

Hello Everyone,

I'm trying to design a set of gears to maximize the bending fatige life, within a given center distance and face width. I'm trying to learn how the pitch, pressure angle and helical or spur will effect the fatigue life of the gear. Can anyone point me towards a suitable text book, or a few papers that might be beneficial?

Thanks,
Kurt.

 

[gearcutter]

A simply Google search will help you to find all of the info that you seek.

Below is a list of books that I'd suggest you try to get hold of. Any one of them will be of great help to you. Most University libraries will contain at least one of these books.

Download a trial version of a gear calculation program. As a student, I'm sure that it would be free. I'd suggest a program called KISSsoft.

On The Geometry of External Involute Spur Gears - Khiralla

Spur Gears - Buckingham

Dudley's Gear Handbook - Dudley/Townsend

Handbook of Gear Design - Maitra

Analytical Mechanics of Gears - Buckingham

Gear Engineering - Merritt

Gear Design, Manufacturing & Inspection Manual - SAE International

Fundamentals of Gear Design - Drago

 

[Kurt61342]

I will take a look through the books you have poseted. So far everything I have been able to find just shows the lewis equation. I am looking for something that has a little more in depth explanation. How does the contact ratio of a spur gear effect its fatigue life, or doesn't it? How does the lewis equation translate to a helical gear, and how the contact ratio plays into it.



PhD Student, and Product Support Engineer for Caterpillar Motorgraders.

 

[gearcutter]

As posts from students are generally not allowed in the forums here; unfortunately you aren't going to find anyone here that will be able to answer your specific questions.
Better off for you to hone your researching skills and try a bit harder as all the information you seek is easily available on the net..........if you take the time to look and learn how to use the appropriate search queries.
I just did a very basic search via Google and received 264,000 hits related to this subject.

 

[Kurt61342]

There's the issue. Between being a full time engineer, and doing my research, there isn't a lot of time to search through 264,000 google hits, which 263,000 are going to be the same information that I allready know. I would think that someone who is a professional gear designer could point me to a piece of literature.

For example, my research is in combustion modeling and I could point someone to an exact text or paper that I have read based on the information they are looking for.

PhD Student, and Product Support Engineer for Caterpillar Motorgraders.

 

[gearcutter]

I apologise for assuming that you are a full time student.

To save you time; the best thing that I can recommend you do is to download a trial version of KISSsoft. Then you can play around with the parameters and see in real-time how the changes you make affect the life of the gear set.

http://www.kisssoft.ch/english/downloads/index.php

 

[tbuelna]

Kurt61342-

Optimizing the design of a gearset for particular requirements is definitely an exercise in compromise. This is one of those tasks where experience is invaluable. An experienced gear designer can take a look at a set of design requirements and fairly quickly provide you recommendations for a gear design that is pretty close to optimum.

As gearcutter noted there are some excellent software tools (Kissoft, UTS, etc.) that simplify the task of iterating your gear design to produce an optimized solution by tweaking variables like material or tooth geometry. These software tools can be quite expensive, but since you work for Caterpillar engineering I would imagine you could get access to the gear design/analysis tools the company uses.

As a PhD student, if you want an analytical approach to optimize a gearset for certain requirements then purchase a copy of AGMA 901-A92 "A Rational Procedure for the Preliminary
Design of Minimum Volume Gears". This document covers the same approach used by most software applications.

Best of luck to you.
Terry