Gear Wheel Finishing with Abrasive Brushing Tools to Improve the Surface Quality of Tooth Flanks for the Industrial Application

A high surface quality of tooth flanks can improve the service life and the performance of gears, as well as reduce acoustic emissions. However, high demands on the gear geometry pose a challenge for the finishing of tooth flank surfaces because the dimensional accuracy that can be achieved with modern grinding processes must not be impaired by the finishing process. A preceding study has shown fundamentally that profiled abrasive brushing tools can be used to improve the quality of individual tooth flank surfaces. Due to the integration into the grinding machine, it represents a promising alternative to common finishing applications. Before the process can be used in an industrial environment, process reliability and tool life must be examined. For this purpose, complete reference gearwheels (39 × 10) were finished with the brushing tools. It could be shown that the surface roughness can be reliably reduced by ΔRa ≈ 0.2 µm by using a single brush for an entire gearwheel without changing the gear geometry. In addition to the influence of the tool specifications on the work result, the influence of the initial roughness after grinding was considered in particular. It was found that the achievable surface roughness depends significantly on the depth of the grinding grooves, as these are retained as desired, while the roughness peaks are fully smoothed. Furthermore, a device for the machine-integrated profiling and dressing of brushing tools was successfully designed, implemented, and tested.