Multi-body Dynamics Study of Gears

Abstract

Gear faults can usually occur due to fatigue, spalling or pitting caused by wear, load fluctuations, backlash etc. This severely reduces actual strength of the gears and prompts crack growth. Fatigue cracks may appear in the region of highest stresses, whose location can be determined based on numerical analysis, meshing force variability, point of application and its direction [6]. So, an understanding of the tooth failure mechanism is needed to design more reliable gears. Numerical methods are one of the techniques to study crack initiation and propagation and are discussed here.