International Scientific Journals
of Scientific Technical Union of Mechanical Engineering "Industry 4.0"

Due to very force competition, all producer, not only manufacturers of gearboxes, have been forced to constantly improve their products. This has led to the harmonization of the technical characteristics of their gear units, even though they are not yet defined by the standard. Modern solutions of universal helical gearboxes are characterized, first of all, by large torque capacity and high values of gear ratio in the frame of relatively small overall dimensions of the gear unit. This paper provides an overview of common activities undertaken by manufacturers of universal helical gearbox to improve technical characteristics of their products.

A review of the retrospective and modern state in the field of theory and practice of plastic gears is presented. Various aspects of such gears design, technology and applications are discussed. It is noted that corresponding problems are under considerationpermanently on the last common engineering meetings and specialized ones. The analysis of the papers allows to conclude that main trends in plastic gears are the following once: comparison the experimental results with VDI 2736 and JIS 1759 normative paper data; development of the methods of accelerated tests; investigation on fatigue bending strength, pitting and wear resistance; improvement of the noise, vibration and harshness behaviors; analysis and optimization of reinforced composite materials structure; application of additive technologies; fabrication of high precise plastic gears and development of computer-aided design methodology.

The main features of creating an information model (Digital Twin) for a technically complicated item are formulated. These include: a multitude of systemic representations of the item, individualization of its behavior and state under specific operating conditions, fatal uncertainty in the description of component properties, reconstruction of data based on sensors readings, individual lifetime expense in operation. Above features are illustrated by authors’ developments in application to power transmissions. The key issues of synthesis, calculation, design and diagnostics of transmissions based on the created complex of lifetime-and-functional models are solved. Transmission is considered as a multicomponent system with a variable structure and states. Creating a single universal model to reproduce basic properties of the technically complicated item is impossible. Principles of constructing models and methods for calculating, monitoring and predicting functional and lifetime properties are described. The basic representations of the transmission (structure, regular mechanical system, kinematic and dynamic diagrams, diagnostic model, schemes of limiting states, lifetime expense model) and the mathematical models serving them are developed. The approaches considered are methodologically typical for complex mechanical and combined objects based on mechanical systems.