Gear design

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When desiging gears for FDM fabrication in ArtOfIllusion there are two essential things to bear in mind: The basics of conventional gear design, and the accuracy or lack thereof in the final result. So, before we get stuck in to the AoI nitty-gritty, here's an Express Guide to Gear Design.

Gear Design Basics

If you're an engineer, this is probably old hat - but read it anyway so you can correct my mitsakes. Gears are generally round, with teeth. The number of teeth and their shape are more important than is initally apparent. They need to mesh, and so need to be the same size. The incoming gear teeth must contact at the right place, and only at the right place - which is why they're a funny shape and not square or little triangles.

The tip of the gear teeth are not supposed to go all the way down into the opposing trough. If that happens the next incoming tooth tip smacks into the top of the opposing tooth. Contact between teeth is notionally along a point just over half way (typically a 1:1.25 split) up the teeth, and this is called the 'Pitch Line'. The bit above the pitch line is called the 'Addendum', the bit below it the 'Dedendum'. The angle of tilt on the faces of the teeth is called the 'Pressure Angle' and is normally about 20 degrees.

The distance between the centre of one tooth tip to the centre of the next is called the 'Pitch'. You want the pitch on touching gears to be as close as you can get it. Ideally, the pitch is 2.25 times the height of the teeth.

The forces between the contacting teeth have to be even and consistent, or vibration builds up. So does noise and wear. These problems are made worse by teeth flexing around, so with a relativley soft plastic we're going to have interesting problems.

To provide mechanical advantage, contacting gears have different numbers of teeth. A little gear driving a big gear will increase the power and slow down the speed of rotation. Gears typically have prime or at least odd or non-multiple numbers of teeth. This is so that the same teeth do not always press against one another, so distributing wear, dirt, oil and squashed fingers etc. evenly across all gear teeth involved.

FDM Restrictions

Gears made from ABS or Polymorph need to be sturdily constructed in order to survive. Little pointy bits will soon be broken off when the mechanism (inevitably) jams. Wear & tear is a fact of life, and so plenty of extra material is needed. In short, your gears will be chunky and inaccurate.

We make the gears fairly thick, as the larger contact area lowers the contact pressure and hence the wear. We use smooth curves rather than angular jumps, partly because the FDM machine can't be sufficiently accurate, and partly because they'd introduce points of wear.

To lower the mass of the plastic used, we put strategic cut-outs in the gear to create spokes. Everything is still kept nice and chunky to avoid flexing. Flexing leads to wear and noise.

Although the FDM processes available will produce a theoretical accuracy of 0.1mm, the smallest individual feature that can reliably be reproduced is 0.6mm. So that sets the absolute minimum width of a gear tooth with no shaping whatsoever.

Finally, we need to attach some of the gears to a shaft. As the plastic is not that strong, this needs big, chunky collars to hold big grub screws, or in the case of this example a recess to hold a nut.

Actually Designing Gears In ArtOfIllusion

The gears described here are the ones used to raise and lower the turntable. The larger gears attach to studding, which goes up and down when turned in a captive nut on the RepRap carriage. The smaller gear is slipped on to the shaft of a stepper motor and turns the other 3 gears simultaneously. Because the accuracy provided by the thread is very high, and the amount of slack in the gears produces a relatively small error in displacement of the platform, some play in the gears is acceptable. In other situations this may be a big problem, and cunning solutions known as anti-backlash gears are required.

To make life easier, AoI has a "Cog" script, which I (VikOlliver) adapted from a "Star" script kindly created for me by Francois Guillet.

To load it, go to AoI's "Tools" menu, and select the Scripts & Plugins Manager. Under the "Install" tab are many useful bits. In Scripts/Tools you'll find a "Cog" script. If it's not there you may have installed it already.

GearDesignInAoI-aoi cog window.png

To actually design the gears requires a fair bit of thought. You need to figure out how big they are going to be, and determine a suitable tooth size. The example teeth are 3.85 mm pitch. The big gear has 79 teeth, the smaller gear 16 teeth; 79 divides by 16 very poorly, so wear should be evenly distributed. Use elementary geometry to figure out the diameter of the gears.

The height of the teeth should be just over half the pitch, and these are 2mm high. So when entering the Cog script parameters, the outer diameter is 2mm larger than the inner diameter.

The taper of the side of the teeth is defined in the Cog script as a ratio. A process of blind experimentation determined that a value of 0.12 - 0.13 seemed to be about right. Once all the parameters are entered in, the gear can be created. This results in a 2D path that looks remarkably like a gear.

GearDesignInAoI-set cog smoothness.png

Having made the basic shape of the cog, we need to shape the rather square teeth. This is done by editing the cog shape (right click on it in the objects window) and selecting all points before setting the smoothing factor to 0.5 under Tools/Smoothing. The cog can then be extruded using Tools/Extrude to the required thickness; 6mm seemed about right for this one, with the central cog being over twice that high.

Once they're extruded and converted into a triangle mesh, edit the mesh using the editor's Edge mode and close the ends up. Just drag the mouse to select all the edges on one end, then use Tools/Close Selected Boundary.


AoI Rendering of a finished set of gears to raise and lower the RepRap turntable

The larger gears in the illustration above have been pierced to save plastic, and a central hole to allow a piece of M5 studding to be inserted through them. A sturdy collar with a hexagonal well has been added, which traps an M5 nut. Adding a large M5 washer and nut to the other side, and doing the nut up tight securely traps the gear in place.

The smaller gear is pierced with a 4mm hole into which a piece of PVC tubing is pushed. The gear is then slipped over the 3mm shaft on a stepper motor, compressing the tubing and forming a snug, centred friction fit.

References

Basic Gear Formulas http://www.pic-design.com/tech/gear_form/gear_form1.htm

How gears work http://auto.howstuffworks.com/gear.htm -- Main.SvendSrensen - 16 Nov 2005

-- Main.VikOlliver - 14 Nov 2005