Fatigue Reliability Design Method for Large Aviation Planetary System Considering the Flexibility of the Ring Gear

Abstract

As the foundation and core of various heavy aircraft transmission systems, the reliability level of large-scale aviation planetary mechanism restricts the economic affordability and service safety for the aircraft to a great extent. This paper takes the heavy helicopter planetary mechanism as the research object, and aims to improve the fatigue reliability level of the system. The fatigue load history of the gear teeth under the coupling of global elastic behavior of the system is calculated using a hierarchical finite element method, and the fatigue strength distribution of gear teeth is fitted based on the gear low circumference fatigue test with the minimum order statistics transformation method to provide cost-effective load and strength input variables for the system reliability prediction model. Based on this, a mapping path from the key structural elements of large-scale aviation planetary mechanism to the system reliability indexes is established, and then a new method of reliability-driven multi-objective optimization design for planetary mechanism structural dimensions is proposed. Finally, the influence law of ring gear rim thickness on the fatigue reliability of the planetary gear train is analyzed and the NSGA-Ⅱ genetic algorithm is used to determine the optimal stiffness matching result of the rim size of the designated type of large aviation planetary system. The stiffness potential of the core structural elements is maximized as a way to balance the contradiction between reliability and lightweight requirements of a large aviation planetary system.

Keywords

• planetary transmission
• hierarchical analysis
• finite element method
• reliability modeling
• fatigue test
• NSGA-Ⅱ