Meshing performance of spiral bevel gear with different loads and modules considering edge contact by finite element method

To analyze the edge contact of spiral bevel gears, owing to its effect on meshing performance, batch processing is performed based on a static solver and the finite element method (FEM) because of its computational speed advantage. A series of programs automatically perform the functions of modeling, analysis, and extraction of performance indexes. Starting from the entrance meshing position to the exit meshing position, a series of models was built and analyzed to describe the whole meshing process of the gear pair. For a specific gear pair, contact and bending stresses, contact stress patterns, loaded transmission errors, contact forces, and load sharing coefficients are calculated under five different load conditions and the change rules are summarized. Edge contact phenomenon occurs as the load increases to a critical value, resulting in a sharp increase in contact stress. As the load increases, the load sharing coefficient decreases gradually and the absolute value of transmission error increases, but the fluctuation of transmission error first decreases and then increases. In addition, the effect of modules is discussed and the results show that large modulus will decrease stress, contact ratio, and edge contact, but there is a certain module to minimize the fluctuation of transmission error.