| This thesis describes an approach towards the development of intelligent design support environments for mechanical transmission systems, along with implementation details of a distributed knowledge-based gearing design and manufacturing system that is deployed over the Internet. The system embodies the various tasks of the design process, with modules that address: performance evaluation, process optimization, manufacturability analysis, and provides reasoning and decision-making capabilities for reducing the time between gear tooth creation, detailed design and final production. This methodology is highly desirable in that it is able to simulate real working conditions, evaluate and optimize the design effectively, prevent designers from time-consuming iterations and reduce long and expensive test phases.; A three-step algorithm, which relates to gear construction design, manufacturability analysis of gear construction and die-design optimization, is used to generate parametric gear models and automatically extract design information for manufacturing process planning based on the feature-based parametric design system. It also utilizes the shape optimization method for preform stages to avoid costly production problems.; Estimation of the number of preforming stages, generation of detail die drawings, and forging load and energy requirements are calculated based on available material design databases, knowledge-based rules and feature-level calculations.; A case study is presented to demonstrate the variation of the gear tooth stresses during the meshing cycle as a result of manufacturing error misalignment resulting in pinion axis angular misalignments ranging between +1° and −1°. Results obtained from the investigation show that the influence of spur gear axes misalignment significantly affects the load distribution along the line of contact and results in increases in the stresses at the contact and root positions, which are essential parameters when designing a reliable gear set.; Utilization of the World Wide Web, as a medium for the implementation of gear design and its agile manufacturing is also being demonstrated. A combination of HTML, JavaScript, VRML, CGI Script and C++ based procedures is used to bring this capability to users distributed anywhere in the world. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
