Design, Modeling and Experiment of a Novel Synchronous Belt Drive with Noncircular Pulleys

摘要

The synchronous belt drive with noncircular pulleys can be used to obtain accurate transmission with a specific motion law, but the shortage of big belt slack caused by noncircular pulleys limits its application. In order to reduce the belt slack, a novel synchronous belt drive with noncircular pulleys, which is formed by a driving circular pulley, a driven eccentric pulley and a noncircular tension pulley, was presented in this paper. During the transmission from the driving circular pulley to the driven eccentric pulley, the belt slack is compensated by the noncircular tension pulley. The calculation models for this novel synchronous belt drive were built based on tangent equations of the noncircular pulleys. The pitch curve of the noncircular tension pulley and the length of the synchronous belt were deduced by iterative algorithm. Subsequently, an auxiliary application program for the numerical calculation of these models, using MATLAB, was developed. The calculation examples by using this program prove that the proposed noncircular synchronous belt drive has far less belt slack than the traditional noncircular synchronous belt drive without tension pulley. At last, the results of the mathematical calculation were compared with the experimental data and good agreement has been reached.