Simulation of wear in gears with flank interference—a mixed FE and analytical approach

Abstract

Gears in precision mechanisms, such as industrial robots, are often designed to have no backlash. Deviations from the ideal gear geometries and unfavourable deformations during operation may cause interference between interacting tooth flanks, resulting in high and strongly varying friction. Mild wear of the tooth flanks may improve such conditions. Therefore, this theoretical study has been conducted of wear in spur gears with interference. A mixed finite element (FE) and analytical approach is used. The FE method is used to determine contact loads between the interacting gear teeth. The main drawback with FE analyses of this type of problem is normally the computation time needed. Therefore, a novel FE meshing method is used, giving a dense FE mesh in the contact regions and a coarse mesh in the rest of the teeth. Based on the FE determined loads between the interacting teeth, the contact pressures and the contact widths are then easily determined using analytical expressions based on Hertz theory. The wear of a point on a tooth flank is determined by integrating the product of sliding distance and contact pressure during the time it is in contact with its mating flank. The results show that the wear of the gear tooth flanks may eliminate the interference and consequently the high and strongly varying friction will decrease dramatically. However, the transmission error will change, since the gears will not preserve their accurate involute profiles.