A new worm grinding method of face gears based on the optimization of dressing wheel profile

Face gear drives have been well applied in high-speed and heavy load applications. Due to the strict requirements of machining accuracy and quality for those applications, face gears are mainly manufactured by worm grinding method, of which a dressing wheel is applied to generate the worm surface as its enveloped surface. Based on this manufacturing process, the profile of the dressing wheel should be well defined to make sure the final meshing performance of the face gear drives. In this work, we firstly investigate the mathematical model of dressing wheel with a general profile modification. The worm surface is the envelope to the family of dressing wheel surfaces. Specially, the result is obtained as a closed-form. Subsequently, the face gear tooth surface is calculated as the envelope surface of the worm surface. With the tooth surface models of both face gear and pinion, the tooth contact analysis (TCA) can be computed. According to this method, different parameters for the profile modification of the dressing wheel are compared to improve the working performances by finding the minimal transmission error without edge contacts. The proposed method is validated with simulations.