Development of Cutting Force Measurement System for Gear Hobbing

Abstract

Increasing demands for high quality and high performance gear manufacturing are reflected in a need for a model based investigation of gear hobbing process. This paper presents the development of a system for online measurement of actual cutting force components during gear hobbing. Although there are a large number of well developed cutting force measuring systems for different machining operations available in the market, it is difficult to find a system tailored to the requirements of a gear hobbing process. Hence, a fixture containing piezoelectric dynamometer and telemetry device is developed. The fixture is designed taking the real machining circumstances into consideration. The telemetry system enables wireless measurement of cutting force while machining. Multiphysics finite element analysis and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) are used as tools for modeling, simulation, and calibration of the developed system. Final stage of this work includes conducting hobbing experiments to validate both the model and the force measurement system.