Research on Spiral Bevel Gear NC Machining Control Method

Based on spiral bevel gear NC manufacture principle and generating motion of the generating gear and the work gear, the NC generation of spiral bevel gear cutting is realized by means of the vector transformation. As sophisticated calculation of the transformation is hard to implement in each interpolation cycle of NC machining, the coordinated motion of NC coordinate axes is expressed as quintic parametric spline functions, which use the rotation angle of the work gear as the parameter. The constrained optimization method of three design variables is established to obtain contacting points of gear tooth surfaces, which are acquired by solving nonlinear equations sets traditionally. The condition of normal coincidence is simplified and the object function of the equal position vectors of mating gears is established. The contacting points of gear tooth surfaces can be used for tooth contact analysis. The parametric curve interpolator is combined with spiral bevel gear NC machining, and is applied to the self-developed spiral bevel gear NC milling machine to control the gear cutting. Experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective in the control of NC machining for the spiral bevel gear.