Abstract
A troublesome problem in flat belt transmission is called lateral motion or skew, a phenomenon that the belt moves in pulley axial direction while traveling in rotation direction. The skew is caused by angular misalignment or deflection of the pulley. There are tow kinds of angular misalignment, in-plane and out-of-plane misalignment. The former is that a pulley, driving or driven, inclines in the base plane constructed by two pulley axes, and the latter a pulley inclines in the plane perpendicular to the base plane. In this paper, the mechanism of belt skew caused by in-plane misalignment is clarified and the analytical solution derived following the discussions on some calculation results by FEM. It has been found that the skew caused by in-plane misalignment is much more complicated than that caused by out-of-plane misalignment. The skew ratio depends on both geometrical and material parameters of pulleys and belt.
