Investigation of Basic Design Parameters Effect on the Single Tooth and Mesh Stiffness by Finite Element Method

Single tooth stiffness and mesh stiffness are the one of the most important parameters of the gear design. They play an active role especially on dynamic loads of gears. Furthermore, gear stiffness is the most important parameter that determines the load sharing in the teeth in contact. In this study, a comprehensive method was developed to calculate single tooth stiffness and mesh stiffness. In the first part, a finite element model was created to calculate the single tooth stiffness. By using the stiffness curves obtained for one tooth, the time-varying mesh stiffness is calculated for the gear mechanisms. The calculated stiffness values were verified by comparing with similar studies in the literature. In the second phase, the effect of different basic gear design parameters on single tooth stiffness and mesh stiffness is investigated. The effects of number of teeth, pressure angle, profile shift factor, tooth addendum height and cutting tool tip radius were investigated. In addition, a user interface created in the MATLAB environment so that designers can quickly evaluate the results obtained. As a result when the number of teeth, the pressure angle, cutting tool tip radius are increase the stiffness values increase too. Increment in the tooth addendum height is led to a decreasement in tooth stiffness. Positive profile shifting operation is increased the stiffness and the negative profile shifting operation is decreased the stiffness of the gear