Stress Analysis and Mass Optimization of Epicyclic Gearbox Housing A Review

The gearbox manufacturing Companies are proposing three to five stage epicyclic gearboxes and it is widely used in sugar mill and wind mill drives. It was found that high volume gearbox costs are very dependent upon material cost and the weights of the planetary drives. It was difficult to quickly find an optimum solution, while the space restriction was given and weight was to be minimized. For most of the gearboxes; housing dimensions are derived from thumb rule or empirical relations. Such process of design lead to conservative dimensions leading to bulky housing and such process was very time consuming. Today’s computational hardware and software offers quick analysis and design modifications capabilities which can be used for design improvement and optimization of products. So, here aims are stress analysis of the housing using ANSYS workbench and reduce the mass of the epicyclic gear train housing by using MATLAB optimization tool box.