Tooth Contact Evaluation of Hypoid Gears Using Middle-Infrared Ray Imagery

Nowadays the infrared imaging technology has been developing in various fields. We therefore focus on the infrared ray imagery to investigate the gear tooth meshing. In the present report, a high response infrared thermography was used to estimate the tooth contact of hypoid gear under running conditions. The obtained data was the middle infrared ray image around 4 μm wavelength. Especially, we looked at the increase of temperature on the tooth surface caused by gear meshing. As a result, it is clear that the temperature was affected by contact pressure, relative sliding speed between tooth surfaces and average peripheral speed of tooth surface. This proposed method is effective to evaluate the tooth contact of hypoid gear.