A Design Method of Gear Trains Using a Genetic Algorithm

The design of gear train is a kind of mixed problems which have to determine various types of design variables; i,e., continuous, discrete, and integer variables. Therefore, the most common practice of optimum design using the derivative of objective function has difficulty in solving those kinds of problems and the optimum solution also depends on initial guess because there are many sophisticated constrains. In this study, the Genetic Algorithm is introduced for the optimum design of gear trains to solve such problems and we propose a genetic algorithm based gear design system. This system is applied for the geometrical volume(size) minimization problem of the two-stage gear train and the simple planetary gear train to show that genetic algorithm is better than the conventional algorithm solving the problems that have continuous, discrete, and integer variables. In this system, each design factor such as strength, durability, interference, contact ratio, etc. is considered on the basis of AGMA standards to satisfy the required design specification and the performance with minimizing the geometrical volume(size) of gear trains