INVESTIGATING AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO GENERATE ASYMMETRIC TOOTH PROFILES AND ANALYZING BENDING STRESS
Gears are the mechanical components and are predominant as the most effective means of power transmission in mining equipment, which encompasses a wide range of machinery used in the extraction of minerals and resources from the earth. Currently, gears in mining equipment are prone to different types of failures when subjected to impact, shock, and fatigue loads. It is noticed from the literature that 34.4% of the failures are due to poor lubrication, 19.6% due to impurity, 17.7% due to fixing errors, 6.9% are due to excess load, and 2.8% failures are due to handling errors. Further, more than 1,500 gear failures were examined throughout the investigation, and it was observed that tooth bending fatigue is the common mode, leading to tooth fracture at the root owing to bending stress. Bending stress developed at the tooth root can be minimized by modifying the addendum of mating gears or the involute geometry. An additional alteration that is rarely used is to make the gear asymmetric or nonstandard.
Therefore, in this research work, attempts are made to generate a non-standard spur gear tooth profile by varying the pressure angle and profile shift using APDL program to estimate bending stress using FE software ANSYS. Bending stress calculated using the Lewis equation and FE analysis were compared to validate the FE procedure. It is noticed that bending stress was reduced to 38% by increasing the pressure angle from 20° to 35° without altering other gear parameters. Therefore, the utilization of non-standard asymmetric spur gears offers a potential means to minimize the risk of tooth breakage.
ANSYS APDL, Bending Stress, FEA, Asymmetric Spur Gears, Profile Generation.