Numerical tooth contact analysis of gear transmissions through the discretization and adaptive refinement of the contact surfaces

The tooth contact analysis (TCA) is an important resource for the design of gear drives. This widely used analysis provides the contact pattern, contact path and the function of transmission errors that are directly related to the performance of the gear set. In this work, a new geometric approach for the TCA is proposed. This approach is general, deterministic and independent from the type or alignment status of the gears. It is based on the discretization of the contact surfaces of the reference teeth pair and on a geometrically adaptive refinement to solve the contact problem and to compute the instantaneous contact area for each position of the gear set along the gearing cycle. The new algorithm demonstrated to be versatile, robust and efficient through different test cases, obtaining accurate results with a relatively low computational cost.