Influence of surface topography on the friction and dynamic characteristics of spur gears

Abstract

As an important excitation source of gear dynamic problems, the time-varying friction of tooth surface is closely related to its topography. Considering the friction characteristics of tooth surface is of great significance to improve the calculation accuracy of gear dynamic characteristics. In order to solve the problem that the variation of tooth friction coefficient was simplified too much in the previous gear dynamics research, the time-varying tooth friction coefficient is obtained by fitting the results of twin-disc test in this research. To investigate the influence of tooth surface topography on the friction and dynamic characteristics of spur gears, the relationship between surface topography and friction coefficient under line contact condition is studied using twin-disc tester and analyzed by 3D topography parameters in ISO 25178. The time-varying friction coefficients of spur gears with different tooth surface topographies during meshing are fitted with the experimental results. The influence of time-varying friction coefficient caused by the tooth surface topography on the dynamic characteristics of spur gears under different operating conditions is examined by substituting the fitting curves of time-varying friction coefficient into the multi-degree-of-freedom dynamic model of spur gears. The results show that this influence is mainly embodied in the off-line-of-action direction, which is the direction of friction force acting on the tooth surface. The dynamic characteristics of gears with different surface topography are obviously different under various working conditions. The method presents in this paper simplifies the application of tooth contact analysis in the study of time-varying tooth friction characteristics, which will provide a new way for the gear dynamics research considering the tooth surface topography.