Gear measurements using optical point autofocus profiling

摘要

Traditional methods for gear inspection, as specified in ISO 1328-1, involve measurement of profiles on a flank to determine helix deviation and profile deviation. For such measurements, it is common to inspecting only a selected number of teeth and only a small number of profiles are measured per flank. Although such methods are efficient for tolerance evaluation, they do not obtain surface topography information on gear flanks, which can be critical in tribology studies. Furthermore, due to the determined flank geometry may vary depending on the location of the profiles being measured, and hence may not be representative of the entire gear. In this work we propose the optical measurement of gear flanks using a point autofocus instrument. Measurement of the flank surface on every tooth of the gear is performed to obtain both form and surface topography information. This study describes profile measurement and 3D complete gear measurement, and compares obtained point cloud data with the nominal CAD model.