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I am trying to mesh two spur-type gears and, instead of using just the rotational relationship generated by the 'gears' feature in Mechanism, I am trying to set up cam followers between the mating teeth so that the teeth move only when contact occurs. Trying to get the most realistic reaction forces that I can at the supports of this gear train for structural FEA on a housing that these gears ride in--and I wasn't sure if the 'gears' feature in Mechanism will appropriately capture that.
Initially this worked pretty well and there was little penetration of the parts. Running a Dynamic analysis with a force motor or servo motor driving the assembly I got decent results for about half of the run--for the other half of the run the gear teeth spun through each other. Now, for whatever reason, the gears will turn through each other and only occasionally and briefly hang with the surfaces that are supposed to remain in contact. Any ideas or experience with this?
If this is a simple system (two spur gears, two bearings on each shaft) then it's trivial to calculate the gear mesh forces, assuming you know the working pressure angle, and convert them into simple bearing reactions.
For more complex systems, we use our own software (shameless plug):
http://www.ricardo.com/en-GB/What-we-do/Software/Products/SABR/
which produces a full set of casing reaction loads (including tilt moments, from shaft deflection and non-linear bearing stiffness) for each loadcase; we then apply these loads to the casings in the FEA.