A New Method for Machining Concave Profile of the Worms' Thread

Research and development of wormgear drives have significantly focused on their geometrical accuracy, loadability tests, and their wear resistance and efficiency. The research has been going on in several directions. Individual method of problem solving is development new worm-gear sets and tools for their manufacturing. In the present study, worms with concave profile of their thread have been considered. To avoid the technological difficulties relevant to the application of special cutting tools for machining such gear sets, a rigid incongruent generating pair consisting of a standard hob and toroidal tool has been developed for processing the concave worm profile. The generating surface of the developed toroidal tool, which is essential for the tool manufacturing, was modeled on the basis of hob-toroidal tool interaction. The proposed method of modeling w as divided into three steps: first, the common surface for both hobbing and toroidal tools has been found in terms of hyperboloid of revolution of one sheet, then, the matrix method of transforming the coordinates, from the hob-axis reference frame to the toroidal tool-axis reference frame, has been utilized, and finally, an equation described the generating surface of the toroidal tool has been derived and presented. By using the proposed model and the obtained final equation the worm thread surface machined by the mentioned tool can be defined and experimented.