The contact pattern of a gear coupling varies depending on the amount of tooth lead crowning and the inclination angle. Therefore, it is difficult to accurately evaluate the strength of the gear coupling under a torque using conventional strength methods developed for usual gears. In this study, a high-precision three-dimensional model of a gear coupling was constructed by combining dedicated gear design software with the commercial CAE software SolidWorks. Contact analysis was then performed using the created model and the Simulation function in SolidWorks. In addition, to investigate the influence of inclination angle on the strength of the gear coupling, different models with different inclination angles were created and analyzed through contact simulations. The results showed that when the inclination angle was 0°, all teeth were in uniform contact and the contact pressure was the lowest. As the inclination angle increased, the number of contacting teeth also decreased, but the maximum contact pressure increased. These results indicate that the proposed method enables simple and efficient evaluation of gear coupling strength in a short time, thereby contributing to the advancement of contact strength analysis.
ISHIKAWA et al. (Wed,) studied this question.