Investigation on gear rolling process using conical gear rollers and design method of the conical gear roller

Abstract A type of gear rolling process using conical gear rollers was firstly proposed in this study. Different with the cylindrical gear rollers used in the traditional gear rolling process, the roller which looks like a conical gear with different tooth profile along the axial direction was adopted in the rolling process. Besides, the radial feed applied on the roller in traditional rolling process was replaced by the axial feed applied on the blank. The proposed rolling process was divided into three stages, viz ., tooth graduation, tooth forming and tooth finishing. According to the function of the roller in each stage, the structure of the conical gear roller was designed. Importantly, the detailed formulas to calculate the essential parameters of the gear roller’s tooth in tooth forming stage were established, such as the diameter of addendum circle, the radius of addendum tip, the pressure angle, and the cone angle. Through the numerical simulation, the variation and forming mechanism of the tooth profile at different stages were analyzed. The results revealed that the proposed process achieves better uniform tooth graduation and refining of the tooth profile, which increase the forming accuracy of the tooth to some extent in rolling process. Moreover, the experimental device was developed and the feasibility of the conical gear rolling process was verified.