An Investigation of the Influence of Shaft Misalignment on Bending Stresses of Helical Gears with Lead Crown

Introduction Gears are highly engineered machine elements that must be designed not only to meet the torque, speed, life and noise requirements under nominal conditions, but also to compensate for adverse effects due to manufacturing errors, variations and elastic deformations of the support structures. In addition to the elastic deformation of the support and structures, manufacturing errors in the gears, shafts and housing must also be considered in the design. Assuming that perfectly aligned shafts support a gear pair in which the shafts, bearings and the housing are all rigid might lead to severe wear and noise problems. A reasonably accurate gear pair, with a limited amount of tooth surface manufacturing errors and operated under ideal (no error and no defl ection) support conditions, can be expected to exhibit a good load distribution along its face width. If the shafts are mounted on bearings with position errors, or the shafts, bearings and housing defl ect under load, then the rotational axes of the gears will no longer be parallel to each other. These conditions cause a mismatch of meshing teeth, resulting in a non-uniform load distribution along the face width, with perhaps very little or no load on one side and a larger edge load on the other. Such poor load distribution conditions might result An Investigation of the Infl uence of Shaft Misalignment on Bending Stresses of Helical Gears with Lead Crown