Towards efficient system-level simulation and design of modern mechanical transmissions

Latest trends in the industry of mechanical transmissions demands for a new set of design tools, able to work beyond the assumption of the traditional analytical formulation. Recent progress in the field of model order reduction schemes finally made feasible to deal with dynamic 3D simulations of contact problems for both gears and bearing components, thus posing the base for a new frontier of simulation capabilities where different operational conditions can be analyzed. This paper aims at integrating some of these techniques into a commercial multi-domain 1D simulation software package, moving the first steps towards efficient system level analysis of typical 3D effects like micro/macro geometry modification, misaligned mounting, and perturbed loading conditions. A first proof-of-concept implementation is discussed along the paper. Furthermore, a broad set of case studies is presented, in order to showcase the main advantages of the proposed methodology, with respect to available commercial solution.status: publishe