Contact pressure analysis of spur gear using FEA

Gear is one of the most critical components in a mechanical power transmission system, and most industrial rotating machinery. Spur gear has teeth cut in parallel to each other and imposes radial loads on shafts. Contact stresses are one of the factors which effects performance of gears transmission. This project work made an attempt to summarize about contact stresses developed in a mating spur gear which has involute teeth. A pair of spur gears are taken from a lathe gear box and proceeded forward to calculate contact stresses on their teeth. Contact failure in gears is currently predicted by comparing the calculated Hertz contact stress to experimentally determined allowable values for the given material. The method of calculating gear contact stress by Hertz"s equation originally derived for contact between two cylinders. Analytically these contact stresses are calculated for different module, and these results are compared with the results obtained in modeling analysis in ANSYS. As there involves many iterations in calculating contact stresses analytically a simplified approach is made in VISUAL BASIC for different parameters like module, power, speed. Etc. A model of mating spur gears is generated in SOLIDWORKS and this model is imported to ANSYS Package. The imported model is analyzed in ANSYS workbench for calculating contact pressure for different module of spur gear. These results are compared with analytical results and thus conclusions are made on observing the results. A result advises that with increase in module, Contact Pressure decreases for a pair of spur gears. Results help us to give better performance and future scope in the power transmission field.