| This study focuses on developing new approaches to analyzing and measuring complicated three-dimensional gears and new methods to further utilize gear inspection data for gear quality improvement. Following aspects are addressed: (1) Active use of profile/lead measurement data of three/four teeth of an involute gear is studied. The interactive equations between the elemental traces and the reference misalignment (including eccentricity and wobble) are derived. These equations are used in (a) optimizing the choice of teeth to be inspected in order to obtain better average traces; (b) deriving analytical average profile/lead trace in the case of spur gear inspection and (c) developing procedures to calculate the reference misalignment from profile and lead traces. (2) By employing new concepts of teeth generation, new equations for characterizing the worm gear meshing process and the cylindrical gear hobbing/grinding process are proposed. Exact, analytical and explicit tooth surface equations of a worm wheel and a hobbed/ground cylindrical gear are derived. The applications of these new meshing equations to the determination of undercutting, the design of non-right angle worm gearing and the analytical calculation of the transverse profile of a hobbed/ground gear are discussed. (3) Starting from the derived equation of the generated worm wheel, the inspection of profiles and leads of a worm gear and the simulation of the worm gear meshing process are studied. (4) The reverse engineering procedures of involute gears, worms, both new and broken-in worm wheels and spiral bevel gears are studied. The effect of break-in wear on contact pressures of a worm gear mesh is investigated through a combination of loaded tests, coordinate topographical measurement, reverse engineering and finite element analysis. (5) A reverse engineering measurement strategy that eliminates the tip compensation process is proposed in order to simplify the measurement programming and to make reverse engineering process more efficient. This strategy applies to surface-generated gearing parts, including involute spur/helical gears, ZI, ZN and ZF types of worms and worm gears, spiral bevel gears, hypoid gears, etc. |
