Since the 20th century, the demand for gears has increased rapidly, which has promoted the development and production of gear processing machine tools. In 1952, the three-axis CNC boring and milling machine was successfully developed in the United States, which marked the arrival of the era of CNC machine tools. In 1975, pfauter company of Germany first created the first CNC gear hobbing machine, which began the application of CNC technology in gear hobbing machine tools.
Famous foreign gear manufacturers include Gleason company of the United States, Kapp / Niles group of Germany and sigma Σ Pool group, etc. There are also many new gear processing machines made abroad. As shown in Figure 1, P600 / 800 medium-sized series gear hobbing machine developed by Gleason company. The gear hobbing machine adopts modular design and can be customized according to different requirements of customers. Different tools can be used to process involute and non involute gears and worm gears.
As shown in Figure 2, the kne3g formed grinding wheel gear grinding machine of Kapp / Niles company has an integrated measuring device with a processing gear modulus range of 0.5 ~ 5.0mm, which can be used to measure and evaluate the tooth profile characteristics, and this function can be used to optimize the processing process.
At present, the development trend of gear machining machine tools is: high precision, high efficiency and high stiffness. The application of numerical control technology increases the flexibility of the machine tools and expands the process performance. Development trend of gear processing machine tool industry:
(1) The merger, reorganization and strategic cooperation of major gear manufacturers have sprung up.
(2) The gear processing technology based on gear hobbing, gear shaving and gear honing has gradually changed to gear hobbing and gear grinding.
(3) Gear processing machine tools with composite functions became popular.
(4) High speed and high efficiency cutting technology has developed rapidly.
(5) Machine tools equipped with flexible automatic loading and unloading devices are becoming more and more common.
Gear hobbing machine tools are also developing in the direction of wide application, good flexibility and strong function. In short, the whole gear processing machine tool industry is developing in the direction of high efficiency, multi-function, large-scale, hard tooth surface processing and numerical control.