Minimization of Gear Power Transmission Error using Genetic Algorithm

Helical gears have been used for a wide range of engineering and technological applications especially in automobiles, ship building, aircraft and marine applications. The rapid increasing demand for high speed ratio, highly efficient cum light weight engines, with quite power transmission have led to the need for optimization of helical gears being used till today. For optimization of any engineering design initially problem function is formulated then variable parameters are decided which would minimize or maximize the objective function so as to give an optimal system performance. Today’s competitive market required to optimize Weight and Volume of the gear design. Weight and Volume optimization of gear pairs is difficult to solve because it includes various objectives and large number of variables. Therefore, to solve such difficulty robust optimization technique will be useful to get optimal solution. Genetic algorithm will be useful to solve such difficulty using MATLAB. In this work a helical gear pair design optimization problem is solved. It is a multi-variable, complex non-linear problem with derived objective function and constraints. The objective is to minimize the volume of the gear. The design parameters considered are module, face width, number of teeth on drive and driven and helix angle. Results indicate that GA algorithm gives the best results for all design variables and objective function in helical gear design.