December 8, 2020

Forest City Gear is proud to share a white paper entitled, A Note on the Design of the Gap Between Helices on a Double-helical Gear, authored by Forest City Gear Systems Engineer Andrew F. Vincent, Ph.D.

The white paper’s abstract states, “It is readily observed that the design of the gap between helices on a double-helical gear and the design of the manufacturing process(es) employed to manufacture the gear are inseparable. In particular, the outside diameter and swivel angle of a hob impose a necessary lower bound on the gap between the helices it is meant to produce. There are a number of different simple formulas meant to give approximations to this lower bound. Most are claimed to be accurate within a certain degree of precision. The purpose of this article is to illustrate an analytical solution to the problem that achieves arbitrarily small error.”

The full white paper is available here.

Forest City Gear is an industry-leading authority on the manufacture of small and medium pitch custom gears, including double-helical gears for applications that call for low noise levels without thrust loading.  According to Dr. Vincent, “The computation performed in this white paper also illustrates the calculation of the approach of the cutting tool used in a hobbing process, which we use daily when performing cost estimation. The more we understand the science of gear manufacturing, the better we are able to advise customers during the design process, to help them develop the most effective, efficient and manufacturable gears.”