Abstract: The spiral bevel gear is the key part of the transmission component of the heavy duty vehicles. Its surface integrity plays a key role in the maneuverability and reliability. As the last step of gear machining, grinding residual stress is one of the important factor of surface integrity. It leads to the early fatigue failure if the residual stress doesn't meet the requirements. The distribute characteristic of the gear's residual stress in different grinding parameters are investigated by grinding experiments. The effective residual stress caused by grinding is calculated according to the residual stress of the original gear. It also is calculated by the finite element method basing on thermo-mechanical coupling. The results show that, the residual stress of gear convexity parallel to the grinding direction is the smallest; the residual tensile stress is generated by the grinding process in the gear surface, while in the gear subsurface residual compressive stress is produced. The values of residual stress calculated by the finite element model are accordant with those calculated by the experiment, which shows that it is promising to analyse and predict the residual stress of spiral bevel gear by finite element method.

Key words: finite element analysis, grinding, residual stress, spiral bevel gear, thermo-mechanical coupling