Abstract
In recent years the concern of designing multi-stage gear drives increases with the more application of gear drives in high-speed and high-load. until now however research on the gear drive design has been focused on single gear pairs and the design has been depended on experiences and know-how of designers and carried out commonly by trial and error. We propose the automation of the dimensional design of gears and the configuration design for gear arrangement of two-and three-stage cylindrical gear drives. The dimensional design is divided into two types of design processes to determine the dimensions of gears. The first design process(Process I) uses the total volume of gears to determine gear ratio and uses K factor unit load and aspect ratio to determine gear dimensions. The second one(Process II) makes use of Niemann's formula and center distance to calculate gear ratio and dimensions. Process I and II employ material data from AGMA and ISO standards respectively. The configuration design determines the positions of gears to minimize the volume of gearbox by simulated annealing algorithm. Finally the availability of the design algorithm is validated by the design examples of two-and three-stage gear drives.