Development of a Design System for Multi-Stage Gear Driver (1st Report : Proposal Formal Processes for Dimensional Design)

In recent years, the concern of designing multi-stage gear drives ha increased with more application of them in high-speed and high-load. Until now, however, the researches on the design of gear drives have been focused on single gear pairs. Thus the design practice for multi-stage gear drives has been depended on experiences and expertise of designers and carried out commonly by trial and error. We propose an automation algorithm for the design of two-and three-strage cylindrical gear drives. The two types of dimensional design processes have been proposed to determine gear dimensions in a formal way. The first design process(Process I) uses to total volume of gears to determine gear ration , and uses K factor , unit load and aspect ration to determine gear dimensions, The second one(Process II) makes use of Niemann's formula and center distance to calculate gear ratio and gear dimensions. Process I and Process II employ material date from AGMA and ISO standards, respectively. The configuration design determines the positions of gears with minimizing the volume of gearbox by using a simulated annealing algorithm. The availability of the design algorithm is validated by the design examples to two-and three=stage gear drives.