With a wide range of varieties and specifications, gears are widely used. They are one of the important basic components in the fields of automobile, ship, aviation, engineering machinery, daily tools and national defense industry. Gear manufacturing plays a very important role in the equipment manufacturing industry. Its performance is not only closely related to the national industrial development, but also closely related to daily life. Gear processing machine tool is an important basic equipment in equipment manufacturing industry because of its complex structure and great manufacturing difficulty.
According to the machining principle, the gear machining methods mainly include forming method and generating method (generating method). The forming method has no gear meshing motion and the machining accuracy is very low; During generating machining, there is meshing movement between the gear cutter and the processed gear, enveloping the tooth profile (tooth surface) of the processed gear, and the production efficiency and machining accuracy are high. The common gear hobbing, gear shaper and gear shaving (belonging to finish machining), among which gear hobbing is the most widely used. The gear hobbing machine can cut straight and helical cylindrical gears, as well as splines, worm gears, sprockets, etc. The ownership of gear hobbing machines accounts for about 45 ~ 50% of the total number of gear machine tools.
Although China has basically formed a complete gear manufacturing system by the end of 1970s, the design and manufacturing level is not high, and there is still a large gap with the advanced manufacturing level of foreign countries. In recent years, China’s gear industry has surpassed Italy and jumped to the fourth place in the world, but there are prominent problems such as prominent industrial structural contradictions, overcapacity and insufficient independent innovation ability. With the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry and the gradual deepening of the integration of industrialization and informatization, the gear industry will show the development trend of design informatization, equipment intelligence, process automation and management modernization, and the gear manufacturing enterprises will gradually change from scale speed type to innovation benefit type.
Based on the analysis of the development status of gear hobbing technology, combined with the research on the difficulties and key technologies of gear hobbing, the future development trend of gear hobbing technology and equipment is prospected.