Development of an integrated CAD/CAM system for design and manufacture of spiral bevel and hypoid gears

To enable efficient design and manufacture of spiral bevel and hypoid gears a CAD/CAM system, which includes blank dimension, machine setting and cutter specification generation, tooth contact analysis and undercut checking, was developed. Further development was to integrate an "in-house" developed FE contact-analysis code into the system. Based on the feedback from gear-manufacturing industry current efforts are made to develop interfaces to general-purpose CAD and FE software, with a view to better integrating gear design, manufacture, analysis and other product-development activities.