DEVELOPMENT OF AN OPTIMIZATION TECHNIQUE OF A WARM SHRINK FITTING PROCESS FOR AN AUTOMOTIVE TRANSMISSION PARTS

A fitting process carried out in the automobile transmission assembly line is classified into three classes; heat fitting, press fitting, and their combined fitting. Heat fitting is a method that applies heat in the outer diameter of a gear to a suitable range under the tempering temperature and assembles the gear and the shaft made larger than the inner radius of the gear. Its stress depends on the yield strength of a gear. Press fitting is a method that generally squeezes gear toward that of a shaft at room temperature by a press. Another method heats warmly gear and safely squeezes it toward that of a shaft. A warm shrink fitting process for an automobile transmission part is now gradually increased, but the parts (shaft/gear) assembled by the process produced dimensional change in both outer diameter and profile of the gear so that it may cause noise and vibration between gears. In order to solve these problems, we need an analysis of a warm shrink fitting process in which design parameters such as contact pressure according to fitting interference between outer diameter of a shaft and inner diameter of a gear, fitting temperature, and profile tolerance of gear are involved. In this study, an closed form equation to predict the contact pressure and fitting load was proposed in order to develop an optimization technique of a warm shrink fitting process and verified its reliability through the experimental results measured in the field and FEM, thermal-structural coupled field analysis. Actual loads measured in the field have a good agreement with the results obtained from theoretical and finite element analysis and also the expanded amounts of the outer diameters of the gears have a good agreement with the results.