Comparison of meshing characteristics of helical gears with spalling fault using analytical and finite-element methods

Abstract

Abstract This paper investigates the effect of a gear tooth spalling in a helical gear. An analytical model was developed to study the effect of the damage to the time-varying mesh stiffness, contact stress and tooth root fillet stress. In order to validate the efficiency and the accuracy of the proposed method, a finite element method is presented for simulation, such to compare the mesh stiffness and stresses obtained from the analytical method under different spalling variables, including the spalling lengths, widths, axial positions (in the direction of face width) and tooth orientation positions (from dedendum to addendum). The results show that the proposed analytical method has higher computation efficiency than the finite element method, and the mesh stiffness obtained from two methods shows a good agreement. However, some errors exist between the time-varying mesh stiffness and stresses obtained by the two methods, but change laws of the tooth root stress and contact stress obtained from the two methods are similar. This is because the effects of flank-tip contact and spalling edge contact are considered in the finite element method, which makes the results more accurate than the results obtained by the proposed analytical method.