Performance improvement of set of worm gears used in soot blower through profile modification

The present design of a set of worm gears used in a soot blower produced by a certain manufacturer has an efficiency of 68.8%. A soot blower is one of the most critical components in industrial applications for removing the large amounts of soot generated by boilers and is required to be operational 24×7. The energy consumption of the soot blower depends on its working efficiency and ultimately the design of its set of worm gears. This paper focuses mainly on the design and analysis of available industrial worm-gear sets used in soot blowers. The theoretical, experimental, and finite-element analysis approaches are validated for the stability of the worm gear set under typical input conditions. This paper also describes an analytical design of experiments (DOE) approach to identify the most significant factor for performance (efficiency) improvement and suggests some design improvements for the worm gear set using the profile modification approach. These ensure the efficiency improvement of the current industrial design of the set of worm gears used in a soot blower. The analytical DOE approach helped identify that the number of worm wheel teeth (Z2) and gear module (m) are the two most significant factors affecting performance. Accordingly, based on the improved design, the final efficiency increased from 68.8% to 74.6% (∼8.5% increment), resulting in lower power consumption during industrial application.