The New Gear Finishing Method Research for Highly Loaded Gears

Abstract

Achieving roughness parameters on tooth flanks for highly loaded gears and creating their non-directional surface texture are key to obtaining the required gearbox lifetime, durability, and performance. Many finishing techniques are well-known and described in technical literature, including gear teeth final grinding, shaving, honing, and superfinishing to create the proper surface condition. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of a simple finishing method which can be applied to highly loaded gears in the manufacturing process in order to optimize cost, time, and waste. This work presents the effect of a non-chemical, abrasive, highly effective process to remove quite a large amount of material from gear teeth flanks. The researched technology is called Stream Finishing (SF). The surface condition was inspected to observe its properties before and after the proper SF process parameters definition. It is useful for transmissions groups to define the proper manufacturing process application for obtaining the required gearbox lifetime within optimized parts cost. For each application the process parameters definition shall be determined individually and tested.