Design of topological shape modification of auxiliary pinion of face gears and analysis of meshing performance

To improve the meshing performance of face gears, in this study, we designed a tooth profile and a direction modification curve on a pinion. A topologically modified tooth surface was represented accurately by the sum of two vector functions that determined the theoretical tooth surface and the deviation surface, and the latter was fitting three B-splines on the tooth surface grid. We then established computational models for the tooth contact analysis (TCA) and loaded tooth contact analysis (LTCA) of face gear pairs with the topologically modified pinion. To verify our theoretical analysis results, we then conducted an experiment. The results show that the proposed design enables the transmission error to form a second-order parabolic function by opening downward and tilting the tooth contact path. Compared with traditional face gear pairs, the effective overlap ratio increas by about 10% and tolerance ability increases by 400%. Under different degrees of torque, the fluctuation amplitudes of the loaded transmission errors all decrease significantly. The load distribution changes gently on the flank of the tooth, and the load is reduced when gear tooth enters and withdraws.