Weight Optimization Design For Planetary Gear Train Of Vertical Mixer

Vertical mixer is a kind of important equipment in the manufacture of compositematerials. The performance of vertical mixer is directly affected by the design of its planetarygear box. On the condition of meeting the strength requirement, to minimize the transmissionof weight can improve system efficiency, save materials and lower the cost. The weight ofgears is a large portion of the whole transmission agent. Therefore, optimization design ofgears to reduce gear box weight has its practical significance.To start with, this paper determines the optimization function aiming at reducing theweight of gears according to the characteristics of vertical mixer and chooses the optimizationvariables (6numbers of gear teeth and3pairs of tooth width) after sensibility analysis. Then,constraints including boundary constraint, function constraint and vertical mixer constrainsare given and optimization model is founded.Subsequently, on the basis of optimization model, it has used two methods-SequentialQuadratic Programming method (SQP) and Genetic Algorithm (GA)-to solve theoptimization model. As a result, two sets of optimization parameters are obtained. Comparedwith non-optimization system, these two optimization algorithms both reduce the system’svolume obviously. The performance of these two kinds of methods including contact fatiguestrength, endurance fatigue strength and contact ratio is compared and the results of GA arechosen at the final solution.Finally, in order to test the optimization result, Solidworks is used to realize themodeling and assembling of optimization results. Then with the help of Ansys Workbench,this paper analyzes the gear box’s modal to get its natural frequency and vibration mode,which is then used to make sure that the resonance won’t happen after optimization.