Revisiting Plane-Generated Gear Tooth Surfaces: A Novel Design Perspective

The teeth of ordinary spur and helical gears are generated by a (virtual) rack provided with planar generating surfaces. The resulting tooth surface shapes are a circle-involute cylinder in the case of spur gears, and a circle-involute helicoid for helical gears. Advantages associated with involute geometry are well known: in particular, the motion transmission function is insensitive to center distance variations, and contact lines (or points, when a corrective surface mismatch is applied) evolve along a fixed plane of action, thereby reducing vibrations and noise emission. As a result, involute gears are easier to manufacture and assemble than non-involute gears, and silent to operate. A peculiarity of their generation process is that the motion of the generating planar surface, seen from the fixed space, is a rectilinear translation (while the gear blank is rotated about a fixed axis): the component of such translation that is orthogonal to the generating plane is the one that ultimately dictates the shape of the generated, envelope surface. Starting from this basic fact, we set out to investigate this type of generation-by-envelope process and to profitably use it to explore new potential design layouts. In particular, with some similarity to the basic principles underlying conical involute (or Beveloid) gears, but within a broader scope, we propose a generalization of these concepts to the case of involute surfaces for motion transmission between skew axes (and intersecting axes as a special case). Analytical derivations demonstrate the theoretical possibility of involute profiles transmitting motion between skew axes through line contact and, perihaps more importantly, they lead to apparently novel geometric designs featuring insensitivity of transmission ratio to all misalignments within relatively large limits. The theoretical developments are confirmed by various numerical examples.