Design and Experimental Analysis of Spur Gear–A Multi-objective Approach

Traditional design approaches involve determination of the design parameters that meet only one design condition at a time, which is inadequate for high consistency and reliability. To overcome this problem, an attempt is made to introduce two new design objectives i.e., the weight/volume of the profile modified spur gear drive and the contact or Hertzian stress at points of contacts in the multi-objective design fitness function. The main contributions of the study are multi-objective constraint based design optimization using Particle swarm optimization (PSO), manufacturing of non-standard gear sets using standard tooling, experimental investigation to explore the possibility of protection of the optimized spur gear set against wear, through monitoring of oil bath temperature, gear surface temperature, and frictional power loss.