Gear_Pebble_Stratasys

Last crawled date: 1 year, 11 months ago

Being a Mechanical Aerospace Design Engineer, I developed interest in the 3D printing. This platform has given me an opportunity to put forward my ideas across the globe.
The pebble challenge made me to think about very basic component used almost everywhere in the mechanical engineering filed. That is Gears. I thought of proving the capabilities of Poly-Jet printer in this area.

Overview of Gear pebble:
The gear pebble contains below subparts:
1. Pebble body cover
2. Two Helical Gears
3. Contact pattern indicator

Gear pebble is designed considering below three aspects:
1. To prove gear interaction mechanism using Ploy-Jet printer.
2. Colorful printing in dynamic order.
3. Demonstrate the special ability to use transparent material for printing.

The traditional gear teeth mesh inspection procedure:
In Automotive and Aerospace industries to verify gear teeth mesh mechanism rapid prototyping is done using FDM printers. The colored glue is applied on teeth face surface of the either gear. Then gear teeth contact pattern is observed by checking the color glue stamped on the teeth surface of the other gear. By this procedure misalignments are identified.

Easy way of inspection of gear teeth mesh when proto-typed using Poly-Jet printer:
The pebble contains two transparent gears. As the purpose is to identify the surface area of contact between teeth of the two gears, I have used blue color for its identification. Transparency of gears will help to recognize the overlapping of blue surface of other gear teeth. This gives the clear visual inspection ability.
Teeth surface with blue color represents the exact surface area of engagement between two gears.

Stress identification using color coding:
Red, Orange and Green represents the stress variations on teeth surface when it gets engaged with other gear teeth. The Red color signifies highly stressed area as this surface is in maximum contact with other tooth surface.
Orange surface indicates medium stress concentration and Green indicates low stress concentration.

Specifications of gear pebble:
1. Pebble Body Cover:
Color: Sky blue transparent
Printing material: Veroclear / Veroultraclear for transparent portion and Verovivid for stress concentration bars.
2. Helical Gears:
Color: Creamy transparent and multicolor (Red, Orange, Green)
Printing material: Rjd720.
3. Contact Pattern Indicator:
Color: Blue and White
Printing material: Verovivid.

Assembly procedure:
1. First print Pebble Body Cover. Support is required to create pebble cover flap.( veroclear / veroultraclear and also Verovivid)
2. Print Gears separately(Rjd720)
3. Print Contact Pattern Indicator separately. (Verovivid)
4. At the end fit gears and contact pattern indicator inside the pebble body.