Numerical modeling of wire-prestressed gear teeth

This paper introduces the concept of wire- rope pretensioning in spur gear teeth as a means to obtain higher bending strength. The concept is novel and it is based on the idea of machining small holes in unstressed areas of the working teeth and subsequently passing a wire rope through each pair of holes and applying compressive loading on the tooth by pretensioning the rope. In this way the applied compressive stress field is superimposed on the tensile bending stresses developed at the root of the gear tooth from loading, therefore partially or totally canceling them out. In this way higher load carrying capacity is achieved without compromising any other working property of the gear tooth. In the present study a Finite Element numerical analysis is presented proving the supremacy of the wire-prestressed teeth over their conventional counterparts.