NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF FLEXIBLE PIN MECHANISMS FOR LOAD BALANCING IN PLANETARY GEAR DRIVES

Load balancing mechanism is an important design for planetary gear drives. Among the well-known designs the flexible pin mechanism has advantage for even load sharing among more than three planet gears. However, there is no sufficient information about how to design such mechanisms. The goal of the paper is to propose an analysis approach of flexible pin mechanisms for planetary gear drives numerically and experimentally Two types of flexible pin mechanisms are analyzed in the study, a conventional design and a novel design. Numerical analysis is carried out by software KISSsoft and FEM to evaluate the influence of the design parameters of flexible pin mechanism on the deformation performance. An experiment was finally conducted to verify the analysis results.