Many contributions have focused on the pitting analysis in gear transmissions. However, studies on pitting fatigue in spiral bevel gears are limited due to the complexity of tooth contact and lubrication analysis. This paper is to present a reasonable methodology to simulate the pitting crack nucleation of spiral bevel gears considering the real three-dimensional (3D) rough surface contact where the intermittent asperity stress concentrations is prominent. The proposed model includes a loaded tooth contact analysis model, a mixed elastohydrodynamic lubrication model proposed previously, 3D stress filed formulation, and multi-axial fatigue criterions. In order to determine an appropriate multi-axial fatigue criterion for spiral bevel gear, a characteristic plane approach and a conventional critical plane approach are employed in this study. The predicted micro-pitting lives are compared to published micro-pitting investigations to assess the reliability of two fatigue criterions in simulation of the micro-pitting failure. It is observed that the characteristic plane approach is better to reveal the failure mechanism in spiral bevel gears.

中文翻译：

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混合弹流润滑条件下螺旋锥齿轮的疲劳模型

许多贡献都集中在齿轮传动中的点蚀分析上。然而，由于齿接触和润滑分析的复杂性，螺旋锥齿轮点蚀疲劳的研究受到限制。本文旨在提出一种合理的方法来模拟螺旋锥齿轮的点蚀形核，考虑到真正的三维 (3D) 粗糙表面接触，其中间歇性粗糙应力集中很突出。所提出的模型包括负载齿接触分析模型、先前提出的混合弹性流体动力润滑模型、3D 应力场公式和多轴疲劳准则。为了确定合适的螺旋锥齿轮多轴疲劳准则，本研究采用特征平面法和传统临界平面法。将预测的微点蚀寿命与已发表的微点蚀研究进行比较，以评估两种疲劳准则在微点蚀失效模拟中的可靠性。观察到特征平面方法能更好地揭示螺旋锥齿轮的失效机理。