Gears and gear driveGears are the most durable and rugged of all mechanical drives. They can transmit high power at efficiencies up to 98% and with long service lives. For this reason, gears rather than belts or chains are found in automotive transmissions and most heavy-duty machine drives. On the other hand, gears are more expensive than other drives, especially if they are machined and not made from power metal or plastic.Gear cost increases sharply with demands for high precision and accuracy. So it is important to establish tolerance requirements appropriate for the application. Gears that transmit heavy loads or than operate at high speeds are not particularly expensive, but gears that must do both are costly.Silent gears also are expensive. Instrument and computer gears tend to be costly because speed or displacement ratios must be exact. At the other extreme, gears operating at low speed in exposed locations are normally termed no critical and are made to minimum quality standards.For tooth forms, size, and quality, industrial practice is to follow standards set up by the American Gear Manufactures Association (AGMA).Tooth formStandards published by AGMA establish gear proportions and tooth profiles. Tooth geometry is determined primarily by pitch, depth, and pressure angle.Pitch：Standards pitches are usually whole numbers when measured as diametral pitch P. Coarse-pitch gearing has teeth larger than 20 diametral pitch –usually 0.5 to 19.99. Fine-pitch gearing usually has teeth of diametral pitch 20 to 200.Depth: Standardized in terms of pitch. Standard full-depth have working depth of 2/p. If the teeth have equal addenda(as in standard interchangeable gears) the addendum is 1/p. Stub teeth have a working depth usually 20% less than full-depth teeth. Full-depth teeth have a larger contract ratio than stub teeth. Gears with small numbers of teeth may have undercut so than they do not interfere with one another during engagement. Undercutting reduce active profile and weakens the tooth.Mating gears with long and short addendum have larger load-carrying capacity than standard gears. The addendum of the smaller gear (pinion) is increased while that of largergear is decreased, leaving the whole depth the same. This form is know as recess-action gearing.Pressure Angle: Standard angles are 025. Earlier standards include a20and 014-02/1pressure angle that is still used. Pressure angle affects the force that tends to separate mating gears. High pressure angle decreases the contact ratio (ratio of the number of teeth in contact) but provides a tooth of higher capacity and allows gears to have fewer teeth without undercutting.Backlash: Shortest distances between the non-contacting surfaces of adjacent teeth .Gears are commonly specified according to AGMA Class Number, which is a code denoting important quality characteristics. Quality number denote tooth-element tolerances. The higher the number, the closer the tolerance. Number 8 to 16 apply to fine-pitch gearing.Gears are heat-treated by case-hardening, through-hardening, nitriding, or precipitation hardening. In general, harder gears are stronger and last longer than soft ones. Thus, hardening is a device that cuts the weight and size of gears. Some processes, such as flame-hardening, improve service life but do not necessarily improve strength.Design checklistThe larger in a pair is called the gear, the smaller is called the pinion.Gear Ratio: The number of teeth in the gear divide by the number of teeth in the pinion. Also, ratio of the speed of the pinion to the speed of the gear. In reduction gears, the ratio of input to output speeds.Gear Efficiency:Ratio of output power to input power. (includes consideration of power losses in the gears, in bearings, and from windage and churning of lubricant.) Speed: In a given gear normally limited to some specific pitchline velocity. Speed capabilities can be increased by improving accuracy of the gear teeth and by improving balance of the rotating parts.Power: Load and speed capacity is determined by gear dimensions and by type of gear. Helical and helical-type gears have the greatest capacity (to approximately 30,000 hp). Spiral bevel gear are normally limited to 5,000 hp, and worm gears are usually limited to about 750 hp.Special requirementsMatched-Set Gearing:In applications requiring extremely high accuracy, it may benecessary to match pinion and gear profiles and leads so that mismatch does not exceed the tolerance on profile or lead for the intended application.Tooth Spacing:Some gears require high accuracy in the circular of teeth. Thus, specification of pitch may be required in addition to an accuracy class specification.Backlash:The AMGA standards recommend backlash ranges to provide proper running clearances for mating gears. An overly tight mesh may produce overload. However, zero backlash is required in some applications.Quiet Gears: To make gears as quit as possible, specify the finest pitch allowable for load conditions. (In some instances, however, pitch is coarsened to change mesh frequency to produce a more pleasant, lower-pitch sound.) Use a low pressure angle. Use a modified profile to include root and tip relief. Allow enough backlash. Use high quality numbers. Specify a surface finish of 20 in. or better. Balance the gear set. Use a nonintegral ratio so that the same teeth do not repeatedly engage if both gear and pinion are hardened steel. (If the gear is made of a soft material, an integral ratio allows the gear to cold-work and conform to the pinion, thereby promoting quiet operation.) Make sure critical are at least 20% apart from operating speeding or speed multiples and from frequency of tooth mesh.Multiple mesh gearMultiple mesh refers to move than one pair of gear operating in a train. Can be on parallel or nonparallel axes and on intersection or nonintersecting shafts. They permit higer speed ratios than are feasible with a single pair of gears .Series trains:Overall ratio is input shaft speed divided by output speed ,also the product of individual ratios at each mesh ,except in planetary gears .Ratio is most easily found by dividing the product of numbers of teeth of driven gears by the product of numbers of teeth of driving gears.Speed increasers (with step-up rather than step-down ratios) may require special care in manufacturing and design. They often involve high speeds and may creste problems in gear dynamics. Also, frictional and drag forces are magnified which, in extreme cases , may lead to operational problems.Epicyclic Gearing:Normally, a gear axis remains fixed and only the gears rotates. But in an epicyclic gear train, various gears axes rotate about one anther to provide specialized output motions. With suitable clutchse and brakes, an epicyclic train serves as the planetarygear commonly found in automatic transmissions.Epicyclic trains may use spur or helical gears, external or internal, or bevel gears. In transmissions, the epicyclic (or planetary) gears usually have multiple planets to increase load capacity.In most cases, improved kinematic accuracy in a gearset decreases gear mesh excitation and results in lower drive noise. Gearset accuracy can be increased by modifying the tooth involute profile, by substituting higher quality gearing with tighter manufacturing tolerances, and by improving tooth surface finish. However, if gear mesh excitation generaters resonance somewhere in the drive system, nothing short of a “perfect” gearset will substantially reduce vibration and noise.Tooth profiles are modified to avoid interferences which can result from deflections in the gears, shafts, and housing as teeth engage and disendgage. If these tooth interferences are not compensated for by profile modifications, gears load capacity can be seriously reduced. In addition, the drive will be noisier because tooth interferences generate high dynamic loads. Interferences typically are eliminated by reliving the tooth tip, the tooth flank, or both. Such profile modifications are especially important for high-load , high-speed drives. The graph of sound pressure levelvs tip relief illustrates how tooth profile modifications can affect overall drive noise. If the tip relief is less than this optimum value, drive noise increases because of greater tooth interference; a greater amount of tip relief also increase noise because the contact ratio is decreased.Tighter manufacturing tolerances also produce quietier gears. Tolerances for such parameters as profile error, pitch AGMA quality level. For instance, the graph depicting SPL vs both speed and gear quality shows how noise decreases example, noise is reduced significantly by an increase in accuracy from an AGMA Qn 11 quality to an AGNA Qn 15 quality. However, for most commercial drive applications, it is doubtful that the resulting substantial cost increase for such an accuracy improvement can be justified simply on the basis of reduced drive noise.Previously, it was mentioned that gears must have adequate clearance when loaded to prevent tooth interference during the course of meshing. Tip and flank relief are common profile modifications that control such interference. Gears also require adequate backlash and root clearance. Noise considerations make backlash an important parameter to evaluate duringdrive design. Sufficient backlash must be provided under all load and temperature conditions to avoid a tight mesh, which creates excessively high noise level. A tight mesh due to insufficient backlash occurs when the drive and coast side of a tooth are in contact simultaneously. On the other hand, gears with excessive backlash also are noisy because of impacting teeth during periods of no load or reversing load. Adequate backlash should be provided by tooth thinning rather than by increase in center distance. Tooth thinning dose not decrease the contact ratio, whereas an increase in center distance does. However, tooth thinning does reduce the bending fatigue, a reduction which is small for most gearing systems.齿轮和齿轮传动在所有的机械传动形式中，齿轮传动是一种最结实耐用的传动方式。