Proposed Topic:

Minimization of a Gearbox Weight

The problem of minimum weight design of gear trains has been a subject of many researches
recently, since many high-performance power transmission applications such as automotive,
aerospace and machine tools are all require low weight. Furthermore in almost all structures, it is
extremely important to design elements in a way that the whole construction weight is minimal.
Optimization of a gearbox is a complex task, due to the characteristics of mathematical model
that describe its behavior. Moreover it depends in a large number of design variables. Although
the increase of complexity of the mathematical model gives more accurate results, it slows down
the process of achieving solution. So in order to simplify the formulation of the objective function
in our case we will consider only the volume of gears, shafts and shell.

To minimize gearbox weight, Objective function and constraints must be stated at first, and
because all gearbox components have density near steel, the volume function for components
can be considered as weight function according to the density relative. And the basic objective
function will be considered as below:

Volume of materials = VShafts + VGears + VShell

For constraints we will take into account three types of constraints which are:
1- The interference between each gear and the next shaft (Geometric Constraint)
2- Bending strength, pitting resistance of gears and strength of shafts (Design constraint).
3- Control the value of parameters such as gear number of teeth and face width.
It is expected from this project a formulation of a general objective function to minimize the
gearbox weight in any multi-stage gear. Such function will be a non-linear multi-variable function,
which will be hard to solve without the assistance of computer programming. Thus a Matlab
program algorithm will be used to minimize the gearbox volume/weight.