The theory of spiral bevel gear was put forward by E. Wildhaber, M.L. Baxter, a scientist of Glenson Company in the United States. On this basis, Glenson has formed its own unique spiral bevel gear design, analysis, manufacturing and testing technology, thus forming its monopoly position in the world.
Spiral bevel gear occupies a considerable position in the machinery industry because of its good dynamic performance. Its design and manufacturing technology has been a difficult and hot spot in the manufacturing industry since it came out. The implementation of high-speed, high-efficiency, high-precision, numerical control, integrated, flexible automatic processing is the direction of its development.
Compared with the ordinary straight bevel gear, the design and processing principle of the spiral bevel gear is much more complicated, and its meshing tooth surface is two complex spatial point contact tooth surfaces. Because companies such as Glenson, which currently own the technology, monopolize the technology and never disclose its content, it urges many countries to study and explore the technology, especially in Japan and the Soviet Union. Although some progress has been made, there is still a gap compared with Glenson.
Due to the complexity of the design and processing principle of spiral bevel gears, the machine tool mechanism is very complex. In addition to the transmission chain, evolution chain and tooth splitting mechanism of general machine tools, there are also denatured mechanisms and / or tool tilting mechanisms, and complex adjustment and calculation theories are included. In fact, the spiral bevel gear is a pair of locally conjugated gear pairs, which is used to simplify and approach the tooth surface by the second-order surface tangent to the tooth surface at the calculation point, and the tooth cutting calculation is carried out through the analysis of the node point on the cone of the gear pair. Therefore, in order to make the whole gear pair meet the meshing requirements, it is necessary to constantly try to cut, correct and adjust, the whole process is complicated and tedious, the amount of calculation is large, and the labor intensity of the operator is high. And the requirements for the operators themselves are also very high, the calculation results are a little wrong, so it is necessary to recalculate, which makes the cycle of machining a pair of gears long and the cost high.
With the development of computer technology and digital control technology, the realization of high-precision electronic transmission has opened up a new way for high-precision, efficient and flexible gear machining. At present, foreign gear machine tools are rapidly moving towards NC. For example, in Japan, it took three years to increase the numerical control of machine tools from 7% to 70% in the 1980s. After the numerical control of the gear machine tool, it can not only simplify the mechanism of the machine tool, improve the rigidity of the machine tool, but also increase the flexibility of the machine tool, expand the processing range, improve the machining accuracy of the gear machine tool and simplify the operation.