Study of Gear design Concept to Reduce Root Bending- & Contact Stresses for Automotive Transmission

Sammanfattning: Advanced technologies for the automotive industry require improved designed precision in different areas. Research is needed in order to meet customer demand and satisfaction to increase durability, efficiency, and reliability. That is why continuous development in transmission system has been an exciting topic for many years. The gears in the transmission system demand high resistance against repeated loads acting on the teeth and the ability to engage without energy loss. The intention is to support that effort by investigating seven design cases of a parallel helical gear pair. This master thesis aims to study a gear design concept of adding a supporting ring to reduce the root bending- and contact stresses. To implement this study, seven different design cases were modelled to study the effect of changing the design. One or two support ring structures were added, or the thickness was increased of the gear considered exposed to high stresses. The purpose is to gain a comparative advantage in the automotive industry. M1 is a reference standard design, while the other models (M2-M5/P1-P3) are modified designs with additional rings or changed in thickness. Simulation is an effective and an useful tool to understand and visualize how the complex interaction of the transmission component appears to be. A finite element method (FEM) program was used to investigate these models. The gear pairs were imported into the pre-processor ANSA, the FEM program Abaqus 2017 was used as a solver, and the results were extracted from the post-processor META. To support the aim of this thesis, two of the seven FEM models were validated against a specialized gear calculated program, WindowsLDP, in order to determine the robustness of the simulation models. The transmission error (TE) measurements, root bending- and contact stresses were observed for the validation. Introducing the different models M3-M5 and P1-P3, the root and contact stresses were reduced by 1.2-4.4 and 0.07-4.3 %, respectively, compared to M1. The transmission error TE could differ as much as 85% in M2-M3 as compared to M1. Systematic errors were generated in model M2, therefore the low root stresses obtained in M2 should be considered carefully. Implementing the so-called misalignment measurement, tilting parameter, microgeometry, and profile modification related to crowning and tip relief is discussed and believed to reduce TE measurements, root- and contact stresses. These modifications have not been studied in this thesis. The LDP results showed a trend of higher values compared to the FEM results, which was suggested to be further investigated in the future.