A combined experimental and computational study of lubrication mechanism of high precision reducer adopting a worm gear drive with complicated space surface contact

Abstract

Analysis of friction and lubrication between meshing gear teeth with complicated tooth surfaces has been a difficult problem in analysis of meshing contact of gear real tooth surfaces. Traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods cannot precisely create a structured mesh for complicated space surface and thus have limited applicability for solving problems. In this study, the moving particle semi-implicit (MPS) method is proposed to find out impacts of ration speed, immersion depth, worm arrangement, viscosity of lubricant on the churning power losses and oil pressure distribution in a roller enveloping worm gear drive. The application of MPS method for the simulation of gear meshing and lubrication overcomes the difficulty of meshing gear tooth surfaces that maintain all complex structural details. Meanwhile, an experimental study is performed to verify the simulation results and validate the applied computational methods. The combined experimental and computational approach presented in this paper thus represents a solution for numerically analyzing the friction and lubrication between two moving curved surfaces and can be applied for solving a broad range of transmission problems.