Today’s competitive industrial gear marketplace demands products with excellent reliability, high capacity and low noise. Surface-hardened, ground tooth gearing predominates, but the legacy tooth forms handicap further improvements in capacity and noise generation. Vehicle and aircraft equipment use tooth forms not found in the standard tables to achieve better performance — with little or no increase in cost. This paper will propose adopting these high-contact ratio forms to industrial use.

In recent years the estimation of gearbox power loss is attracting more interest — especially in the wind turbine and automotive gearbox industry — but also in industrial gearboxes where heat dissipation is a consideration as well. As new transmissions concepts are being researched to meet both ecological and commercial demands, a quick and reliable estimation of overall efficiency becomes inevitable in designing the optimal gearbox.

After a sluggish 2013, annual installations of new wind turbines grew by 44% in 2014, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. And while much of that growth has been in Asia— particularly China, which now leads the world with 114 GW of installed capacity—the USA, Europe, and the rest of the world expect steady growth for the next couple of years as well (Fig. 1).