How to specify and choose gears

This is one of the SEED curriculum engineering design guides. SEED (Sharing Experience in Engineering Design) is an organisation of teachers of design in tertiary education.

You can use this guide to select standard gears from catalogues. If you are unfamiliar with standard gears first review the sections on standard gears and gear terminology. Gears can either be obtained as standard components from a manufacturer’s catalogue or alternatively specially designed and manufactured. Smaller sized gears, especially instrument gears, tend to be more readily available from catalogues and larger, less used gear types tend to be produced as specials; usage is claimed by leading manufacturers to be approximately equally divided. For practical reasons, gear catalogues tend to display only geometric and materials data of stock gears rather than specific operational information. This is because functional behaviour will vary with an application and so it is not feasible to give comprehensive data covering all operational conditions within a catalogue for a complete product range. The guide describes a practical approach which ensures that gears selected from a catalogue are technically suitable for a specific application. Technical considerations usually produce a number of viable alternatives so cost may well be the decisive factor influencing the final selection.

The guide details how to: establish the requirements; choose the number of teeth, type and material for the gears; calculate the pitch-line velocity and tooth bending stress; select suitable gears by considering materials and cost. Other information includes notation for calculations, a worked example, details of gear manufacturers, and a bibliography.

[Description and screenshot taken from the SEED Curriculum for Engineering Design page for this guide. (c) The Design Society used under the terms of their (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license.]

Link: http://www.bath.ac.uk/idmrc/themes/projects/delores/co-design-website/dpg/grs/grshome.htm
Author: J. Vogwell; David Mole
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Rights: Copyright 2011 The Design Society - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. See http://www.bath.ac.uk/idmrc/themes/projects/delores/co-design-website/teachers/curriculum/about.html