Abstract
The oil jet lubrication performance of a high-speed and heavy-load gear drive is significantly influenced and determined by the oil jet nozzle layout, as there is extremely limited meshing clearance for the impinging oil stream and an inevitable blocking effect by the rotating gears. A novel mathematical model for calculating the impingement depth of lubrication oil jetting on an orthogonal face gear surface has been developed based on meshing face gear theory and the oil jet lubrication process, and this model contains comprehensive design parameters for the jet nozzle layout and face gear pair. Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) numerical simulations for the oil jet lubrication of an orthogonal face gear pair under different nozzle layout parameters show that a greater mathematically calculated jet impingement depth results in a greater oil volume fraction and oil pressure distribution. The influences of the jet nozzle layout parameters on the lubrication performance have been analyzed and optimized. The relationship between the measured tooth surface temperature from the experiments and the corresponding calculated impingement depth shows that a lower temperature appears in a situation with a greater impingement depth. Good agreement between the mathematical model with the numerical simulation and the experiment validates the effectiveness and accuracy of the method for evaluating the face gear oil jet lubrication performance when using the impingement depth mathematical model.
Highlights
Large amounts of energy will be lost in overcoming the internal friction between the meshing gears, and this will seriously reduce the mechanical efficiency and performance of the transmission system, especially for aeronautical gears under high-speed and heavy-load operation conditions
Face gear drives have been widely used in aeronautical transmission systems, as they offer the advantages of a large contact ratio, good power splitting effect, compact structure, insensitivity to installation errors, etc. [1,2,3,4]
In the case of the given parameters, such as the gear structures, parameters and working conditions, the oil jet lubrication performance can be judged by the oil volume fraction and oil pressure distribution in the meshing area [32,33,34], and a greater oil volume fraction and pressure is commonly recognized as providing better jet lubrication performance
Summary
Large amounts of energy will be lost in overcoming the internal friction between the meshing gears, and this will seriously reduce the mechanical efficiency and performance of the transmission system, especially for aeronautical gears under high-speed and heavy-load operation conditions. Hydrodynamic models of spur gears were established to investigate the variation of oil volume and pressure through CFD simulation to optimize the jet parameters [5,6]. Proposed a novel model of a spur gear pair based on friction dynamics theory and studied the lubrication performance in the high-speed condition by CFD simulation. To analyze the transient temperature behavior of spiral bevel gears, Gan et al [12] proposed a method combining the mixed elastohydrodynamic lubrication with the finite element method and conducted the thermal analysis using the CFD method Another method is to calculate the oil film thickness and film pressure based on a theoretical equation. As far as the relevant studies are concerned, it could take a long time to analyze and evaluate the oil jet lubrication performance of gears using CFD simulations or experiments.
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