Robust Optimization of Cylindrical Gear Tooth Surface Modifications Within Ranges of Torque and Misalignments

Tooth surface modifications are small, micron-level intentional deviations from perfect involute geometries of spur and helical gears. Such modifications are aimed at improving contact pressure distribution, while minimizing the motion transmission error to reduce noise excitations. In actual practice, optimal modification requirements vary with the operating torque level, misalignments, and manufacturing variance. However, most gear literature has been concerned with determining optimal flank form modifications at a single design point, represented by fixed, single load and misalignment values. A new approach to the design of tooth surface modifications is proposed to handle such conditions. The problem is formulated as a robust design optimization problem, and it is solved, in conjunction with an efficient gear contact solver (Load Distribution Program (LDP)), by a direct search, global optimization algorithm aimed at guaranteeing global optimality of the obtained microgeometry solutions. Several tooth surface modifications can be used as microgeometry design variables, including profile, lead, and bias modifications. Depending on the contact solver capabilities, multiple performance metrics can be considered. The proposed method includes the capability of simultaneously and robustly handling several conflicting design objectives. In the present paper, peak contact stress and loaded transmission error amplitude are used as objective functions (to be minimized). At the end, two example optimizations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.