Indeed, the digital world of today has made the analog become obsolete in the instrument industry. However, spur gears remain widely used in engine timing gears as their use offers several advantages. They don’t produce a thrust force when utilized on pumps, crankshafts, or camshafts. Moreover, in applications where rotational speeds increase, the gears also provide the same advantageous reasons. They are also very useful in applications where high power density is achieved through several meshes working together.
However, on the other side of those benefits is one biggest drawback of spur gears. Despite its whole depths of high contact ratio design, they are un par with the great abilities of helical gears in terms of spreading or distributing load over many teeth of the gear. This is very important because total contact ratio is a crucial factor when it comes to generating sound by that pair of gears meshing together. It is through the application of the helix angle that changes the transverse pressure, resulting in lower numbers of pinion teeth before undercutting transpires.
Though many theorists have attempted to model a helical gear as a number of spur gears being mounted with radial variation on a common chart, this modelling seems to be an oversimplification. This is because the sound created by using a traditional spur gear at speed only represents the process of transitioning from one tooth contact to double tooth contact. What this means is that for a real helical gear design to be at work, there are two or more teeth in contact. And this fact changes nearly all aspects about the gear’s performance.
So, it becomes important that you know the specific dynamics of a spur gear first before using it for any application you have. All the technical discussions about the gears will be nonsense without understanding its real dynamics.
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