Research On Pulse Electrochemical Modification Of Gear With Moving Shaped Cathode

Being the widely used parts in mechanical area, gear's quality influences the whole mechanical products' quality directly. It has been revealed that gear's modification can improve its performance patently. Nowadays, mechanical methods are used most often to modify gear, which has limitation in cost and efficiency. To change backward modification status, new process is needed to be developed. In this paper, pulse electrochemical machining (PEM) with moving shaped cathode is studied which is showed to be an available method to modify gear.PEM is one of newly emerged non-traditional machining process. Compared to traditional machining process, PEM can machine any metal material regardless of hardness. The modes of PEM applied in gear modification are various, such as generating method, assembled cathode method, moving cathode method and so on.The adoption of moving cathode can improve distribution of flow field and gap condition, which is applied to more and more basic parts. Due to the rapid development of numerical control technology (NC), the movement controlling of cathode becomes easier and the development trend of PEM changes from complex cathode structure with simple path to simple cathode structure with complex path. So, it is feasible to use PEM to modify gear exactly in practice. The parameters by which tooth profile modification and lead modification are completed differ from each other in PEM. The former is according to gap's non-uniform distribution and the latter the cathode's uneven moving velocity. Both of these two facts are discussed emphatically in the paper. Also, the influence on gear's roughness by moving cathode is studied. The combination of modification and finishing of gear is one of this paper's starting points.The hardware of processing control system developed in the paper is based on personal computer (PC) and motion control card, and the software is designed by C++ language under Visual C++ compiler environment.The experiment result shows that to modify gear with moving cathode in PEM can not only meet the requirements of modification amount, but also improve gear's surface quality and precision. So, it has a good application prospect.