MONITORING OF HYPOID GEAR MESHING BASED ON A THERMAL NETWORK MODEL WITH HIGH-SPEED VIDEO THERMOGRAPHY

抄録

Estimating the tooth meshing conditions of a hypoid gear is difficult because of its complex shape and tooth contact conditions. Therefore, a non-contact method of analysis is proposed for determining tooth contact conditions. The proposed method uses high-speed and high-response photography to analyze the temperature distribution between the pinion and the gear. The high-speed photography is performed using thermography, and the temperature data is extracted from the resulting thermal images.
Additionally, a model is proposed to predict the tooth surface temperature distribution during tooth meshing. The proposed method is based on a thermal network model and uses a simple RC circuit to represent the thermal conductivity of an object. Using thermal images, the thermal properties of a given material are identified by comparing the temperature changes obtained with the calculated results. Additionally, the effects of various parameters are discussed. The comparison shows that infrared tooth surface imagery is effective in estimating hypoid gear tooth meshing conditions. Infrared images and thermal network models are successfully used to determine the heat conduction in a gear, which confirms that it is possible to predict temperature increase on tooth surfaces due to gear meshing. It is concluded that the proposed method is effective in estimating hypoid gear tooth meshing conditions using high-speed video thermography.