Finite Element Analysis of Contact Between Teeth of Self-Healing Composite Gears

摘要

Based on the self-healing mechanism of microcapsules, the preliminary study shows that the fracture toughness of the self-healing composite gears with microcapsules can be effectively improved. The purpose of reducing noise and vibration, self-repairing and prolonging the service life is achieved by adding microcapsules into composite gears. In this paper, the finite element analysis has been done to make a further exploration on the effect of contact stress between teeth of self-healing composite gears. The three-dimensional solid model of gears is built by Pro/ENGINEER, a kind of three-dimensional modeling software. Through the communication between Pro/ENGINEER and ANSYS, the model built by Pro/ENGINEER is imported into ANSYS. By the means of the finite element calculation by ANSYS, the contact stress distributions of the two groups of different microcapsule contents (0% and 3.5%) in gears are obtained. The maximum contact stress of one group with 0% microcapsule in is 3.56 MPa, while the other group is 3.549 MPa. With added microcapsules in, the maximum contact stress of gears is slightly decreased by 0.31%. The effects of mechanical properties of self-healing composite gears lay the foundation for subsequent research.