A Comparative Study of Tooth Wear, Mechanical Power Losses and Efficiency in Normal and High Contact Ratio Asymmetric Spur Gears

The surface tooth wear which occurs at the gear contact region due to inadequate contact strength of the tooth is one of the predominant modes of gear failures. Currently, higher contact ratio spur gears are increasingly used in power transmission applications such as aircraft, wind turbine, automobiles and compact tracked vehicles due to their high load carrying capacity.  In this work, the direct design is found to be one of the efficient gear design methods to reduce the tooth surface wear on high contact ratio asymmetric spur gears. Asymmetric gear tooth is defined as one whose tooth geometry of the drive and coast sides is not symmetric. Asymmetry between tooth sides is achieved by providing two different pressure angles at the respective coast and drive side pitch circles. The area of existence diagrams for normal and high contact ratio gears have been developed to select suitable design solution with the given variables of gear ratio, contact ratio and teeth number. The contact load capacity, wear resistance, power losses and mechanical efficiency have also been deduced for directly designing normal and high contact ratio asymmetric spur gears.