2737 Tooth Contact Analysis of Hypoid Gear Based on the Measurement Data of Real Tooth Surfaces

Usually the tooth contact analysis (i.e. TCA) of hypoid gear is extremely complicated because it uses mathematical reference tooth surfaces, which are described by the machine setting and cutter specifications for each hypoid gear. This paper presents a new TCA method directly using the measured tooth surfaces; the usual reference tooth surfaces are no longer necessary. The original three-dimensional coordinate data of real tooth surfaces are obtained on a coordinate-measuring machine. Especially, the effect of load deflections is considered as the change of mounting distances for predicting the real tooth contact of loaded hypoid gears. As a result, real TCA predictions agreed well to the measured contact pattern and loaded tooth contact observed in endurance test.