Influence of Addendum Modification Factor on Root Stresses in Normal Contact Ratio Asymmetric Spur Gears

Tooth root crack is considered as one of the crucial causes of failure in the gearing system and it occurs at the tooth root due to an excessive bending stress developed in the root region. The modern power transmission gear drives demand high bending load capacity, increased contact load capacity, low weight, reduced noise and longer life. These subsequent conditions are satisfied by the aid of precisely designed asymmetric tooth profile which turns out to be a suitable alternate for symmetric spur gears in applications like aerospace, automotive, gear pump and wind turbine industries. In all step up and step down gear drives (gear ratio > 1), the pinion (smaller in size) is treated as a vulnerable one than gear (larger in size) which is primarily due to the development of maximum root stress in the pinion tooth. This paper presents an idea to improve the bending load capacity of asymmetric spur gear drive system by achieving the same stresses between the asymmetric pinion and gear fillet regions which can be accomplished by providing an appropriate addendum modification. For this modified addendum the pinion and gear teeth proportion equations have been derived. In addition, the addendum modification factors required for a balanced maximum fillet stress condition has been determined through FEM for different parameters like drive side pressure angle, number of teeth and gear ratio. The bending load capacity of the simulated addendum modified asymmetric spur gear drives were observed to be prevalent (very nearly 7%) to that of uncorrected asymmetric gear drives.