Abstract: An improved method of incremental finite element 3-D contact analysis via mixed formula is presented. This method can solve the stiffness equation 4 times as fast as the current method and is used to obtain the contact pressure, the load distribution etc. in meshing gear teeth of bevel gear and spiral and hypoid gear. The pre-processing and post-processing technique in finite element analysis are for the first time applied to set up the computational model for gear tooth stress analysis, At last moire method and photoelastic experimental method have been used to show the validity of the procedure as mentioned above.

Key words: Contact, Finite element method, Gearing