The present paper describes a method for determining geometries of gear-honing wheels used in the final process for manufacturing automotive transmission gears. Inappropriate geometries of gear-honing wheels could cause large undulations on finished gear-tooth flanks, and the finished gear would be out of the required accuracy. In such cases, the geometries of gear-honing wheels are required to be modified iteratively until the finished gears have sufficient accuracy. The change in meshing stiffness of a gear-honing wheel and a finished gear significantly affects the rotational synchronization. The poor rotation synchronization could cause the large undulation on a finished gear-tooth flank, to be different from the target micro geometries. This paper presented a geometrical approach that was proposed for a determination method of gear-honing-wheel geometries. The method allows the meshing stiffness to be balanced. Gear-honing wheels designed with the proposed method induced the desired micro geometries of finished gear-tooth flanks in gear-honing experiments. Therefore, the proposed method with the geometrical approach could be useful for the determination of gear-honing-wheel geometries.
Accompanying the improvement of vehicle interior quietness in recent years, there has been a need to manufacture low-noise transmission gears at low cost. In response to this need, we adopted a gear honing process as the finishing method following heat treatment in order to reduce the source of gear noise. Previously, gear manufacturing processes generally proceeded in the order of hobbing, gear shaving, heat treatment and gear honing. For the purpose of reducing manufacturing costs, however, there has been a trend in recent years to eliminate gear shaving, resulting in just the processes of hobbing, heat treatment and gear honing. However, with the manufacturing processes of hobbing, heat treatment and gear honing, there are several factors that make it necessary to improve the machining accuracy of the hobbing process. Therefore, this paper describes a hobbing simulation that has been conceived as a first step toward improving hobbing accuracy. This simulation was devised to make clear the effect of the positional relationship between the workpiece and the tool on gear accuracy, including workpiece pitch error and tooth runout. It has been verified on the basis of machining tests. The following results were confirmed by the simulation and machining tests. (1) Work piece positioning accuracy during hobbing has a large effect on pitch error and tooth runout. (2) Tool positioning accuracy greatly affects the tooth profile and helix undulation and also has a large effect on imparting periodic error to pitch error and tooth runout. These results confirmed the effectiveness of the hobbing simulation in determining hobbing process control values.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.