Profile Rolling of Gears: A Boundary Element Analysis

Abstract

Profile rolling processes such as those for gears play a very important role in everyday manufacturing. It is demonstrated here that the boundary element method (BEM) can be used to analyze, efficiently and accurately, this class of problems involving both material and geometric nonlinearities, as well as contact boundary conditions. The BEM formulation is capable of using any of a class of combined creep-plasticity-constitutive models with state variables for the description of material behavior. The specific problem considered is plane strain profile rolling of straight-toothed spur gears using the constitutive model originally proposed by Hart. The numerical results obtained from the BEM analysis provide a lot of insights into the process of profile rolling and can become a useful tool in designing these forming processes.