Fatigue Life Prediction of Spherical Gear Couplings

  1. Ibai Ulacia 1
  2. Jon Larrañaga 1
  3. Aitor Arana 1
  4. Aurea Iñurritegi 1
  5. Julen Elizegi 1
  1. 1 Mondragon Unibertsitatea
Journal:
Power Transmission Engineering

ISSN: 2331-2483

Year of publication: 2019

Volume: 13

Issue: 1

Pages: 48-53

Type: Article

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Abstract

Classical coupling load models, still in use, assume a number of teeth in contact for a certain amount of misalignment.However, these models do not account for the tooth stiffness, applied torque or manufacturing errors, which producea sequential engagement of spline teeth. Therefore stressescould be overestimated and thus fatigue life predictions arerendered inaccurate. Recently, several studies have beenperformed in order to account for tooth stiffness and toothspacing errors of such couplings. However, they were onlyapplied in relatively small misalignments (approx. up to 1degree), compared with the case studied in this research (upto 7 degrees).In this work a numerical model has been developed inorder to predict the fatigue life of highly crowned spline coupling geometry. First, the number of teeth in contact hasbeen evaluated for different misalignment and torque conditions. Next, the fatigue life predictions have been calculatedbased on the numerically obtained stresses. Finally, fatiguetests have been performed in order to validate the developedmethodology. It is observed that the numerically estimatedcycles to fatigue failure are close to the experimentally measured fatigue life.

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Funding information

The authors would like to acknowledge the Basque Government for the financial support through LEUNGOR project (ZL-2016/00534).

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