A Method and Software Tool for Automated Gearbox Synthesis

Abstract

In today’s economy, engineering companies strive to reduce product development time and costs. One approach to assisting this goal is to introduce computer-aided methods and tools earlier in the development process. This requires providing robust design automation methods and tools that can support design synthesis and the generation of alternative design configurations, in addition to automated geometric design. A new method for automated gearbox design, tailored for integration within an existing commercial gearbox analysis tool, is described in this paper. The method combines a rule-based generative approach, based on a previous parallel grammar approach for mechanical gear systems, with domain specific heuristics and stochastic search using simulated annealing. Given design specifications that include a bounding box, the number of required speeds and their target ratios, a range of valid gearbox configurations is generated from a minimal initial configuration. Initial test results show that this new method is able to generate a variety of designs which meet the design specifications. The paper concludes with a discussion of the method’s current limitations and a description of the work currently underway to improve and extend its capabilities.