Efficient and accurate worm grinding of spur face gears according to an advanced geometrical analysis and a closed-loop manufacturing process

Abstract

Worm grinding has been applied to manufacture gears to pursue high accuracy and fine surface finish. When the worm used to grind face gears is manufactured with multi-axis computer numerical control (CNC) machining, the machining accuracy is usually improved by increasing the number of tool paths with more time cost. Differently, this work proposes a generated method to improve the efficiency by dressing the worm surface with only one path, and a closed-loop manufacturing process is applied to ensure the machining accuracy. According to an advanced geometric analysis, the worm surface is practically approximated as a swept surface generated by a planar curve. Meanwhile, this curve is applied as the profile of a dressing wheel, which is used to dress the worm surface. The practical machining is carried out in a CNC machine tool, which was originally used to grind helical gears. Finally, a closed-loop manufacturing process including machining, measurement, and modification is proposed to compensate the machining errors. The proposed method is validated with simulations and practical experiments.

Keywords

face gears / worm grinding / worm dressing / geometrical analysis / closed-loop manufacturing

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