Design and Optimization of Helical Gear for Bending Strength

Gearing is one of the most effective methods for transmitting power and rotary motion from the source to its application with or without change of speed or direction. Gears are mostly used to transmit torque and angular velocity from one shaft to another shaft. The method of optimum design is effective in the field of gear research to determine the optimum gear parameters for satisfactory design. In gear design, number of parameters is involved. The gear design also requires an iterative approach to optimize the gear parameters. From the calculation of existing design data given by the company, it can be seen that the bending stresses in the last pair of gearbox is not within permissible limit. So in this dissertation the bending strength of Helical gear is to be maximized for fixed center distance and fixed weight of gearbox, and also fulfilling the certain necessary requirements. Due to the complexity of the problem, it is complicated and time consuming to optimize the design manually. Hence in this dissertation, MATLAB optimization program (Genetic Algorithm) is used for determining the best possible combination of gear parameters and comparison of this result is made with ANSYS results.