Efficient evaluation of spur gear tooth mesh load using pseudo-interference stiffness estimation method

This paper presents a new method, pseudo-interference stiffness estimation (PISE), for evaluating the equivalent mesh stiffness and the mesh load in gear system. The PISE method is based on evaluation of the geometric overlap of two assumedly rigid bodies and estimation of the contact force based on this artificial overlap area (or volume) and the singular stiffness (at the point of contact) of the bodies. Computationally, this procedure is orders of magnitude about 2000 times (in our numerical simulation) faster than finite element analysis of contacting bodies. This significant gain in computational efficiency leads itself to practical dynamic simulation of complex gear systems. In this paper, examples of two cylinders contact problem were solved by PISE method and finite element contact model. The results from both methods show reasonable agreement. PISE is then applied to gear teeth contact problem to estimate the equivalent mesh stiffness. The estimated results were compared with the finite element contact results. The comparison from PISE and finite element contact analysis also shows good agreement.