With the rapid development of information technology and material technology, many new technical achievements have appeared in the field of gear manufacturing in recent years. In 2013, the international organization for standardization issued the latest international standard for gear accuracy iso1328-1:2013 (E). After the promulgation of the new standard, developed countries such as Britain, Italy, Germany, the United States and Japan have adopted it one after another, while China’s current national standard for gear accuracy (gb10095.1-2008) is an equivalent 1995 international standard. If China wants to move from a large manufacturing country to a powerful manufacturing country, the gear industry must be in line with international standards. China’s gear hobbing technology and equipment will also usher in new development opportunities and challenges.
1) Development trend of design informatization and equipment intelligence. With the continuous promotion of “China smart manufacturing” 2025, the development goal of gear hobbing machine enterprises in the future is to realize the “deep integration of industrialization and informatization”. High precision, high fineness, high speed, flexibility and intelligence will become the general direction of upgrading the gear hobbing machine industry and other manufacturing industries in China. In the aspect of gear design, three-dimensional digital modeling and simulation technology are used to save the cost of production and trial production and improve the design life; In terms of gear hobbing processing technology, dry hobbing technology is adopted to realize green manufacturing and clean processing and reduce production cost; In terms of equipment manufacturing, develop high-speed, high-precision and fully digitally controlled gear hobbing machine, simplify the structure of machine tool, realize the full digital and intelligent control of the whole gear cutting process, and improve machining accuracy, cutting efficiency, stability and reliability. The technical reform of gear hobbing machine will take the intelligent control device technology of gear hobbing machine as the core, and be more specialized and practical. At present, compared with foreign advanced technology, domestic research work is still in its infancy, but it is of great significance to improve the quality and technical level of gear manufacturing.
2) The application of new materials and technologies will bring a subversive revolution to the gear processing industry. Such as the application of new plastic and gear mold technology, plastic gears will widely replace metal gears in some occasions. Plastic gear has the advantages of low transmission noise, vibration absorption, self lubrication and high die processing and production efficiency. With the development of plastic forming technology and gear die technology, the application of plastic gear will become a worldwide trend. The rapid development of plastic gear will bring huge market space to gear mould. Under the trend of the great development of the international plastic gear industry, the domestic response to market changes is not sharp enough, the supporting research is difficult to keep up with the market demand, and there is still a lot of room for improvement compared with the advanced level of foreign gear molds.