• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers Conference
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• 1999.10a
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• pp.464-469
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• 1999

Recently, the need for designing multi-stage gear drive has been increased as the hear drives are used more in the applications with high-speed and small volume. The design of multi-stage gear drives includes not only dimensional design but also configuration design of various machine elements. Until now, however, the researches on the design of gear drives are mainly focused on the single-stage gear drives and the design practices for multi-stage gear drives, especially in configuration design activity, mainly depend on the experiences and 'sense' of the designer by trial and error. We propose a design algorithm to automate the dimension design and the configuration design of multi-stage gear drives. The design process consists of four steps. The number of stage should be determined in the first step. In second step, the gear ratios of each reduction stage are determined using random search, and the ratios are basic input for the dimension design of gears, which is performed by the exhaustive search in third step. The designs of gears are guaranteed by the pitting resistance and bending strength rating practices by AGMA rating formulas. In configuration design, the positions of gears are determined to minimize the volume of gearbox using simulated annealing algorithm. The effectiveness of the algorithm is assured by the design example of a 4-stage gear drive.