CAD/CAE of spherical gears

Due to the different manufacturing process, spherical gears can be divided into convex spherical gear and concave spherical gear. Spherical gears have the characteristics of the conical gears, and can be applied in parallel or intersected axes transmission. They allow slight angle deviation in the transmission. Until now, most researches focus on the study of spur gear, conical gears, and helical gears, but researches related to the spherical gear are still rare. In this paper, the characteristics of spherical gears are investigated. Autodesk Inventor graphics software is applied to create a solid model and manufacturing simulation of numerical control processing machine. Then the ANSYS Workbench finite element analysis software is applied for the contact stress analysis. Here combinations of convex-convex and convex-concave spherical gear set are analyzed by the finite element analysis. The contact stress distribution obtained from the FEM analysis will improve the understanding of the spherical gear set applied in actual device.