| The research work of this dissertation consists of two parts. The first part is the application of the finite element method (FEM) to nonlinear frictional contact stress analysis of full 3-D gear coupling models. To the author's best knowledge, no published work using the full 3-D finite element model of gear coupling is available in the literature. FEM models and processes have been developed in this thesis for the analysis of gear coupling with misalignment. The developed processes can be employed as a template to other gear models with different design parameters. They can also be expanded in more complex analyses such as fracture and thermo-elastic analyses. The second part of the research is on the development of two new boundary element algorithms for solving 3-D, frictional, and linear elastostatic contact problems. The main contribution of this research is that solving 3-D boundary element models with non-conforming discretizations becomes possible for the first time by using the proposed algorithms. These algorithms are implemented in a new 3-D boundary element code using C++ and verified using several numerical examples. For the models studied, the results using the new boundary element algorithms match well with the finite element results and clearly demonstrate the feasibility of the new boundary element approach for 3-D contact analysis. |
