Geometric design of involute spur gear drives with symmetric and asymmetric teeth using the Realized Potential Method

The index gear drive potential is defined for the estimation of the quality of spur gear drives as a maximum contact ratio obtained at the contact of teeth profiles along the full line of action. In this paper, a new method is proposed for the geometric design of symmetric and asymmetric involute meshing in which the contact ratio of the gear drive is equal to its potential. This method is appropriate for the geometric design of spur gears with a small teeth number and is based on the generalized model of involute meshing. The gear drive potential is assigned as an input value, from which, after appropriate calculations, the geometry of rack-cutters, gears and involute meshing can be determined. Using the proposed method, the areas of the realized potential and the areas of the existence of involute gear drives are defined. In addition, many numerical examples are solved. In the cases of symmetric and asymmetric meshing, the minimum teeth number is obtained when the gear drive potential is larger than one. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.