Of all the many types of machine elements which exist today, gears are among the most commonly used. Many researches have been done to manufacture helical gears by cold forging and extrusion. Although cold forging and extrusion were applied to some bevel, spur, and helical gears, problems in connection with reducing forming load and tool life still make it difficult for the related methods to be commercialized. In this study, focusing on reducing load in forming helical gears, extrusion of helical gears by a two-step process is proposed. The process is composed of an extrusion step of spur gears used as preform and a torsion step of the preform to make helical gears. Upper-bound analysis for the two-step process is performed and compared with results of experiments. The newly proposed method can be used as an advanced forming technique to remarkably reduce the forming load and replace the conventional forming process of helical gears.

A new grid-based approach is presented for automatic generation of hexahedral meshes for simulation of plastic deformation in metal forming. In this approach, special enveloping schemes are applied, to eradicate the sources of the degenerate elements that may appear in a generated mesh. The schemes are described in detail, along with a complete procedure for mesh generation. The capability of the approach to deal with an arbitrary, 3-D process geometry is demonstrated through application to a selected forming problem.