Research On The Optimization Of The Cutting Part Reducer Of The Road Header

Reducer is an important component of the cutting part of a road header. The performance of the reducer affects the quality of the road header significantly. Planetary gear reducer is widely used, because of its high transmission efficiency, wide range of transmission ratio, small size and light weight.The contribution of this work is to provide an optimized design of the reducer. The research process includes virtual prototype simulation based on CAD/CAE/CAM software and optimization module of the MATLAB. The innovative optimization method could decrease time and costs during design process.At the first part of this paper, a 3D prototype of the cutting part is built up using UG and CAXA. Gear profiles can be generated in CAXA with input parameters, such as number of teeth, modules, pressure angles, modification coefficients, etc. Gear profiles are exported as IGES files and imported into UG to build and assemble a detailed 3D prototype.Secondly, calculation of gear teeth-distributing principles and strength conditions of planetary gear transmission is given to provide a direction for optimization programming. On the other hand, strength checking on input shaft, transmission shaft and output shaft has also been carried out.At last, MATLAB is employed in optimization with the minimum reducer volume as object function. Care has been taken to restriction of planetary gear teeth-distributing conditions (transmission ratios, concentric conditions, adjacent conditions, assembling conditions) and gear design conditions (tooth contacting overlap ratio, tooth number and modification coefficient, tooth width coefficient, contacting strength conditions of gear surface and gear bend strength conditions). According to the optimization, design results which meet all constraint condition requirements are obtained and some of the parameters are rounded. The volume has been reduced by 3.5%, while the cost cut down significantly.