Innovative design of spur gear tooth with infill structure
. The progress of additive manufacturing technology brings about many new questions and challenges. Additive manufacturing technology allows for designing machine elements with smaller mass, but at the same time with the same stiffness and stress loading capacity. By using additive manufacturing it is possible to produce gears in the form of shell shape with infill inside. This study is carried out as an attempt to answer the question which type of infill, and with how much density, is optimal for a spur gear tooth to ensure the best stiffness and stress loading capacity. An analysis is performed using numerical finite element method. Two new infill structures are proposed: triangular infill with five different densities and topology infill designed according to the already known results for 2D cantilever topology optimization, known as Michell structures. The von Mises stress, displacements and bending stiffness are analyzed for full body gear tooth and for shell body gear tooth with above mentioned types of infill structure.