Abstract: From manufacturability perspective, a method is proposed for the determination of contact pattern height of spiral bevel gears based on the optimization of transmission errors with the idea of reducing vibration and noise and improving the bearing performance of contact tooth surface. According to the predetermined meshing performances at the mean contact point, pinion machine-tool settings is obtained by means of local synthesis and then tooth contact analysis (TCA) is performed. By contrasting the difference between the pre-designed symmetrical parabola transmission errors and that of the TCA results, an objective function is set up, and a method to control the contact pattern height of spiral bevel gears is established. After optimizing the transmission error curve, the relationship between the contact pattern height and the intersection points of neighboring transmission errors are analyzed quantitatively. A spiral bevel gear pair in aviation was applied to exemplify the proposed method. The results show that the contact pattern height is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the second derivative of transmission errors. When it changes from 0.01 to 0.1, pinion contact pattern height decreases from 2.035 mm to 1.812 mm, and that of gear decreases from 1.969 mm to 1.724 mm, and the amount of relative variation are at 10.96% and 12.44% for the pinion and gear, respectively. The proposed method is helpful in designing contact pattern height of manufacturability.

Key words: contact pattern height, local synthesis, spiral bevel gears, tooth contact analysis, transmission errors