Theoretical and numerical evaluation of tilting moment in crowned teeth splined couplings

Spline couplings are mechanical components used to connect two rotating shafts. These components may allow angular misalignment between two connected shafts, but this misalignment may cause uneven reacting loads. These loads are balanced by the bearings and other components of the transmission system that may results overloaded. For this reason it is very important for designer to know the entity of these loads during the calculation transmission systems. The study presented in this work aims to fill the lack in the literature related to the moment generated by spline couplings with crowned teeth. These phenomena have been analyzed by means of FE models and the effect of both misaligned angle and transmitted torque has been investigated. A theoretical model to estimate the tiling moment entity has also been proposed and its results have been compared with those obtained by the numerical simulations. Results show that tilting moment is influenced by misalignment angle value and it has non-linear behavior with respect to transmitted torque. The theoretical model presented in this work, well matches tilting moment values obtained by FE simulations.