A New Model for the Single Mesh Stiffness Calculation of Helical Gears Using the Slicing Principle

In this paper, two types of helical gear pairs are defined based on the relationship between the transverse contact ratio and overlap contact ratio. An improved analytical model using the slicing principle is proposed for the calculation of the single mesh stiffness of helical gears. The main improvement in this model against traditional models, that assume no coupling effects between neighbouring sliced tooth pieces, is that a parabola-like weighting factor distribution along the tooth face width is assigned on the sliced tooth pieces for the consideration of the coupling effect. This allows each tooth piece to be associated with a weighting factor and therefore have a different influence on the total mesh stiffness. The calculation results for the single mesh stiffness of two types of helical gear pairs obtained from various methods are compared and discussed. It was found that, compared with the traditional analytical method, the proposed analytical method yields more accurate results in terms of the shape of the single mesh stiffness curve and maximum value of the single mesh stiffness, especially for helical gears with a wide face and large helix angle.