MechDev-Calculation core
Calculation kernel for effective gear calculation
Motivation
Nowadays, gear design is not a process that can only be done with pen and paper. Therefore, different software solutions have been developed and used in the past to make the gear design process more efficient. Besides usability, an efficient calculation kernel is one of the main pillars of a successful gear design software. Only an efficient calculation kernel enables a dynamic-interactive transmission design and also increases the acceptance of the software.
In this subproject, it was investigated how such an efficient calculation kernel can be designed. The calculation kernel developed in this way was subsequently implemented in the transmission design software Mechanism Developer, short MechDev.
Goal
Efficient gear calculation is possible mainly when analytical rather than numerical calculation methods are used. However, there are gears that can only be calculated numerically. Therefore, numerical and analytical methods are to be combined in the best possible way. Through the combination, analytical calculation should be used if possible. Only if such a calculation is not possible, numerical approaches can be resorted to.
Result
The result of this investigation is a mesh-based calculation method. Gears are divided into meshes in order to validate the calculability of the meshes. If a mesh can be calculated analytically, it is calculated analytically. If meshes are not analytically computable, a numerical approach based on Newton's method is chosen. By using analytical approaches, a significant increase in the performance of the computational algorithms was achieved. A detailed description of the calculation kernel is described in the dissertation "Combination of analytical and numerical calculation methods as the basis of a software system for gear design" by Tom-Philip Mannheim.