Spiral bevel gears have been widely used in many industrial fields, such as aviation, automobile, shipbuilding, construction machinery and so on. Spiral bevel gear can be regarded as a straight bevel gear cut into countless slices and rotated. The tooth meshing is carried out continuously and smoothly from one end to the other. Due to the increase of overlap coefficient of tooth meshing, spiral bevel gear runs more smoothly than straight bevel gear and zero degree bevel gear, and its bearing capacity is also higher, and the noise and vibration of high-speed operation are significantly reduced. Therefore, the straight bevel gear used in aviation, navigation, automobile, tractor and various precision machine tools has been gradually replaced by spiral bevel gear pair. The design and manufacture of spiral bevel gear plays a very important role in the machinery industry.
Under ideal working conditions, all the working tooth surfaces of spiral bevel gears should participate in the work. At the same time, the contact marks of the teeth gradually disappear at the top and end of the teeth. In this way, the gear has the maximum bearing capacity, and the operation is the most stable and noise-free. However, in fact, in all working conditions, this ideal tooth contact is impossible. The design and manufacturing errors of support and gear must be considered, and the manufacturing and assembly errors limit the effective contact length and width.
With the development of modern industry, the high load and high speed of gear transmission has become the development trend of gear industry, and the requirements for gear transmission performance are higher and higher. The traditional design and calculation methods can not meet the requirements. In terms of processing and manufacturing, the adoption of advanced technologies such as CNC has also made the study of the relationship between tooth surface contact marks and bearing capacity in the process of gear meshing play a more and more direct and important role in guiding production.
In the early 1960s, it was proposed to use tooth contact analysis to theoretically analyze the light load operation quality and contact characteristics of spiral bevel gear pair and hypoid gear pair. Since then, it has been improved and considered edge contact. At present, it has been widely used in gear industry. The premise of the correctness of this analysis method is the gear pair under no-load or light load.