Design and extraction of tooth profile of denatured elliptical gear

Elliptical gear is a common type of non-circular gear; it’s theory and design methods are mature. But the research on denatured elliptical gear was not enough, the design method of tooth profile was single, low precision, and there may occur tooth overlap at the splice when the denatured elliptical gear is generated by the envelope method. The denatured elliptical gear design in the existing literature did not include tooth profile point extraction, so the denatured elliptical gear design only exists in theory, it can’t obtain the necessary data for processing and production. Given this situation, a design method is proposed to design denatured elliptical gear, and the tooth profile data are extracted. The main steps are as follows: firstly, the arc length of gear was calculated, and the arc length corresponding to the rotation angle is obtained. The piecewise interpolation of the gear with equal arc length was spliced together to get a complete envelope image, then, the image was binary processed. Finally, using the designed program, the tooth profile pixels were extracted by the eight-neighborhood algorithm. This method provides a new way of designing denatured elliptical gear, this method is stable and has a fast operation speed. The tooth profile data can be directly used for 3D modeling or wire cutting machining.