Design and Analysis of Spur Gear Cutting Atta...

Design and Analysis of Spur Gear Cutting Attachment for Lathe Machine

Author Name : P Kumar, Dr G Ramesh, V Balaji chowdary, V Ansar, S Mohan, Y Mohan Krishna

ABSTRACT

Lathe is a very important manufacturing subsystem in many sectors. Even though it is a versatile machine, it has some limitations while performing certain operations like a spline, gear cutting. The use of milling machines in the production of spline and gear cutting is well recognized. If an attachment on general purpose lathe is made available, the cost of production of a product could be reduced. A CNC machine can perform the said operations more effectively since the human involvement is limited. However, due to increase in the cost of a CNC machine and the indirect costs associated with these machines, they are considered as white elephants ina certain class of manufacturing units.

This project, therefore, aims at the design and development of an attachment that can help lathe operations to produce splines and gears of a product effectively and also realize cost reduction. It is essential that the product quality should be made comparable with that of milling operation or even better. Such an attachment will increase the flexibility of the lathe.

Two concepts are being attempted in the design and development of the attachment. One is to provision the headstock with the work piece while tool post is loaded with a tool and is guided by a special purpose motor. The second method is that the headstock containing the tool is going to rotate at various speeds while the tool post or tail stock contains work piece for holding, cutting angle and changing direction to perform gearing and slotting operations. One of the methods is chosen and developed. The developed design is modelled by using CATIA V5 and themodel is simulated in Solidworks motion simulator software. To test the strength of the attachment ANSYS software is chosen. By using ANSYS tool static structural analysis is performed. In the end,the attachment is fabricated and it is attached to the lathe machine also test run is made.

Keywords: spline gear, head stock, tail stock, cutting angle.