ABSTRACT
Gears are widely used in high-end equipment, such as industrial machines and transportation vehicles. The precision of gears is an important factor that greatly affects the performance, service life, safety, and reliability of high-end equipment and is determined by the gear manufacturing and finishing process. As one of the most common gear manufacturing methods, gear hobbing is widely used due to its extremely high efficiency. Nowadays, gear hobbing is also usually considered as a semifinishing process. Compared with the gear grinding process, gear hobbing has advantages such as high efficiency and low cost. The efficiency of gear hobbing is 4 times higher and the cost is more than half less than that of the grinding process. To improve the gear hobbing precision, it is necessary to find out the factors that affect the gear geometric errors. Many factors could affect the precision of the gear’s surface, such as the position error of the machine tool, the inaccuracy of the cutting edge, the built up edge of the cutter, the processing technique, the properties of material to be cut, etc. Among these factors, three main aspects are the
grinding technology to improve the gear surface’s forming accuracy and surface finish. Zhou et al. (2015) developed an exact model of the spiral bevel gear by studying the process of the milling gear tooth surface by using the method of differential geometry. Bergseth et al. (2012) investigated the influence on the tooth surface microstructure with different processing methods.
