On the Design and Simulation of Hybrid Metal-Composite Gears

摘要

The aim of this work is to show how the use of a composite body affects the behaviour of hybrid metal-composite gears during meshing. The proposed model compares a spur hybrid gear to a steel lightweight gear of equal mass in order to study the influence of the composite web on the mesh stiffness. In a finite element (FE) simulation environment, the body of the gear is represented as a sequence of CFRP unidirectional (UD) plies arranged in a symmetric layup and resulting in quasi-isotropic properties. Static non-linear FE analyses are conducted to evaluate the static transmission error (STE) curve of the hybrid gear pair and to compare it against the one achieved by a pair of steel gears with a thin-rimmed lightweight design and with the same macro-geometry properties. Additionally, a cohesive modelling technique is used to take account for the damage at the metal-composite interface.