Development of an Interactive Web-Based Support System for Gear Design

The Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) are now evolving as an important communication technology and a major information resource provider for industry. This paper discusses the development and implementation of a knowledge-based gear design and manufacturing system over the Internet to create new integrated design and manufacturing environments. By providing access to an interactive web-based support system, any designer with a WWW browser becomes a potential user of this on-line design system. Once connected, the designer follows the system instructions and submits the necessary input data on the appropriate web pages. The server receives a request from a client and invokes a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) program that processes the information provided through the user Interface. The CGI parses the data and has the ability to remotely run the knowledge-based gear design system that integrates knowledge about all aspects of gear design and manufacturing and provides powerful reasoning and decision-making capabilities for reducing the time between gear tooth creation, detailed design and manufacturing process specification via the Internet. When the execution is completed, full specifications definition, geometry, kinematic-loads and stresses are determined through Finite Element Analysis (FEA) within ANSYS, VRML models of the gear pair and gearbox assembly including gears, shafts, bearings and housing are exported according to the designer requests and sent back to designer on the web browser. To accomplish this, a combination of HTML, JavaScript, VRML, CGI Script and C++ is used. Finally, an example on spur gear design utilizing a parallel gearbox design model configuration is discussed.