Abstract
A new and general approach for curvatures of conjugate surfaces is provided in this paper. The main characteristic of the approach is that relative curvatures and geodesic torsions of the conjugate surfaces are directly calculated in terms of the normal curvatures and geodesic torsions of the generating surface on two non-orthogonal tangents of surface curvilinears in global surface system. In comparison with the current approaches that use two orthogonal tangents or the principal directions in local system at each calculating point, the approach developed in this paper has a simple calculating process and a simple computer program. Based on the curvature equations, sliding velocities and sliding ratios of the conjugate surfaces are studied. The approach is illustrated by a numerical example of a plane enveloping globoidal wormgear drive.