Prediction of Theoretical Wear in High Contact Ratio Spur Gear Drive

Gear contact surface wear is one of the important failure modes in gear systems. The procedure implemented in this work includes finite element multi pair contact modeling to predict the load sharing between the simultaneously contacting pairs and mathematical programming method to estimate the gear surface wear in high contact ratio gear drives for particular number of cycles. A method to find out the new tooth profile and the worn out volume after some particular number of wear cycles is also presented. The parametric study based on the pre established center distance and also for the fixed pitch circle radius are discussed. The variation of wear depth at various contact point along the path of contact shows the maximum wear depth at the beginning and end of the contact in gear drive, but the highest wear occurs at the dedendum flank portion or root portion of tooth surface.