Computer Aided Gearbox Design

Transmission of power from one shaft to another is done through gears. Usually, the driver (input) shaft rotates at a fixed speed. A number of speeds depending on the requirement may be available on the driven (output) shaft. A gear box contains a number of gears, pinions and intermediate shafts arranged in a suitable manner to achieve the above.

The design of a gear box involves finding out of the optimum number of gears, pinions and intermediate shafts, centre distance between shafts, module and number of teeth of the gears and pinions, shaft diameters, key dimensions etc-for given input and output speeds and horsepower transmission. This paper describes how the calculations and the other procedures necessary for this purpose can be done using an Electronic Computer. The design steps are similar to manual calculations usually adopted for the purpose. However, the speed and consistency of the Electronic Computer makes the entire design procedure very fast, completely error-free and much less costly. An extension of the design procedure to have the design displayed on a graphics terminal and plotted on a Plotter is also described in the paper-