Development and Comparison of Shaft-Gear Models for the Computation of Gear Misalignments due to Power Transmission
Gear misalignments cause transmission errors, the shift of the bearing contact and may reduce substantially the life of gears. Some gear misalignments are caused directly by shafts misalignments but others are mainly related with the torque transmission and shaft bending. Even for perfectly aligned gear drives, shaft bending due to power transmission causes the shifting of the bearing contact towards the edge of the gear tooth surfaces for those non-modified gear drives with theoretical lineal contact. In this paper, four different models (two based on the Bernoulli’s beam theory and two based on the finite element method) have been proposed for shaft and gear modeling in order to estimate misalignments of gears due to power transmission in a conventional spur gear transmission. The influence of transmitted torque, length of shafts and relative position of gears over the shafts on the errors of alignment has been investigated.