A new geometrically adaptive approach for tooth contact analysis of gear drives

Tooth Contact Analysis (TCA) is an important tool directed to the determination of contact patterns, contact paths, and transmission errors in gear drives. In this work, a new general approach that is applicable to any kind of gear geometry is proposed. It is based on three main points: (i) the discretization of gear tooth contacting surfaces in triangular meshes, (ii) the implementation of algorithms to determine linear and angular distances between contacting meshes and (iii) the adaptive refinement of the contacting meshes to solve the contact problem and to compute the bearing contact for each position along the gearing cycle.