A Novel Method for Calculation Gear Tooth Stiffness for Dynamic Analysis of Spur Gears With Asymmetric Teeth

Recently, there have been a number of research activities on spur gears with asymmetric teeth. The benefits of asymmetric gears are: higher load capacity, reduced bending and contact stress, lower weight, lower dynamic loads, reduced wear depths on tooth flank, higher reliability, and higher efficiency. Each of the benefits can be obtained through asymmetric teeth designed correctly. Gears operate in several conditions, such as inappropriate lubrication, excessive loads and installation problems. In working conditions, damage can occur in tooth surfaces due to excessive loads and unsuitable operating conditions. One of the important parameters of the tooth is stiffness, which is found to be reduced proportionally to the severity of the defect by asymmetric tooth design as described in this paper. The estimation of gear stiffness is an important parameter for determining loads between the gear teeth when two sets of teeth are in contact. In this paper, a 2-D tooth model is developed for finite elements analysis. A novel formula is derived from finite element results in order to estimate tooth stiffness depending on the tooth number and pressure angle on the drive side. Tooth stiffness for spur gears with asymmetric teeth is calculated and the results were compared with well known equations in literature.