Noncircular Gears Designed by Geometric Hypothesis

Abstract

Noncircular gears are continuously challenging the specialists from the gear industry, due to their industrial performance and new research abilities induced by the advances in virtual modeling and processing technologies. The authors propose the Gielis’ supershape as the chosen geometry for the driving pitch curve in order to generalize the noncircular gears design. Specific algorithms are developed in accordance to the supershape geometry complexity and restrictions resulting from a “technical” selection of a proper pitch curve from the wide family of supershapes. Original steps and codes enrich the traditional noncircular design procedure, divided into: i) studies on the influence of the supershape defining parameters on its scaled geometry, according to specific gear data such as number of teeth and gear modulus; ii) generation of the driven gear pitch curve, based on the kinematics and geometric conditions of pure rolling between mating centrodes. New codes and an iterative procedure are applied to solve the step key problem, respective the center distance determination, respectively; iii) noncircular gear virtual generation, developed using both solid modeling, for the gear cutting process simulation, and analytical procedure.