Gear Reverse-Order Meshing—Phenomenon, Analysis, and Application

The gear drive is theoretically a normal-order meshing process to transmit movement and power. When temperature variation, misalignment, manufacture error, or deformation occurs, the normal-order meshing will be destroyed. Under certain conditions, the contact point moves in the opposite direction to the normal order on the surface of the tooth. This process is called gear reverse-order meshing. The gear reverse-order meshing will lead to gear impact and generate noise during the transmission. In the study, with gear pairs with base pitch deviation as the study object, we further studied this process and expanded the application scope of the process to kinematics and dynamics. The transmission error of the gear reverse-order meshing process was deduced. Both the speed error and acceleration error were obtained. Based on the curves of these three variables, the influence of gear reverse-order meshing on gear transmission characteristic was analyzed to explore the causes for the meshing impact phenomenon. Although the gear reverse-order meshing process has some disadvantages, it could also be applied in some fields. Due to the feature of gear reverse-order meshing, it is applied to gear integrated error (GIE) measuring technique and tooth-skipped gear honing process effectively.