Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the 3-D flow of the lubricants around the mesh-ending region of a rotating helical gear pair. One of the roles of the lubricants is cooling tooth surfaces, so it's desirable that the lubricants should be delivered adequately to the tooth surfaces just after the meshing. It's supposed that the lubricants flows might be affected by the air-flow around the mesh region. An effective lubrication should be considered with the flow. In this report, an experimental apparatus is introduced, and the summarized 3-D behaviors of the flow around the mesh-ending region of the rotating gear pair are shown. In these experiments, an acrylic helical gear pair is immersed into the water, and driven. Tracer particles are injected above the meshing like lubricants but against meshing direction and the tracings are visualized. The motions of the particles are captured by a high-speed camera. The camera is located to be able to look into the space between the teeth. Optical astigmatism is introduced intentionally into the system for the observation with the high-speed camera. With this optical system, distorted elliptic images of the particles are observed when the particles are out of focus.
