We have successfully developed a tooth profile which enables a spur gear having zero relative curvature at contact points under the engagement through the concave/convex pattern of contact and further enables a single flank of the tooth profile to have the infinite number of points where the relative curvature and specific sliding are zero values. We have given a name of “LogiX” to this tooth profile. A W-N (Wildhaber-Novikov) tooth profi¨le has been known as that having the concave/convex pattern of contact. The tooth profile, however, is applied only to a helical gear due to its feature of a point contact. While, on the LogiX tooth profile, an improvement has been made so that a pair of spur gears having the tooth profile may contact each other through the concave/convex pattern of a line-contact which cannot be achieved by the W-N tooth profile. Therefore, the LogiX tooth profile has realized a spur gear whose surface durability is as high as that of the W-N tooth profile. Since the results of durability tests show slightly higher than an involute one, it is expected that a new type heavy duty gear of this tooth profile puts into practical use. Furthermore, the tooth profile will have the possibility of creating the new era in the history of tooth profile theory.

In this paper, the circular-arc curvilinear tooth gear drive is proposed. The gear and pinion tooth surfaces are generated by two complemented circular-arc rack cutters with curvilinear tooth-traces. According to the theory of gearing, the mathematical model of the proposed gear is developed. The tooth contact analysis technique is utilized to investigate the kinematical errors of circular-arc curvilinear tooth gear drives under different assembly errors. Contact patterns of the circular-arc curvilinear tooth gear drive are simulated by the developed computer-aided tooth contact analysis programs and surface topology method. Numerical examples are presented to show the kinematical errors of the circular-arc curvilinear tooth gear set under different assembly conditions. Relations among the circular-arc tooth profile, curvilinear tooth-trace, contact ratio, contact pattern, and kinematical error are also demonstrated by numerical examples.

A new W-N gear tooth profile is developed. The gear developed has an addendum of circular arc and a dedendum of involute curve. This particular tooth profile is believed to solve the problem of conventional W-N gear profile—that is, the profile is sensitive to center distance variations. No pitting on the gear was observed even after 1 × 107 revolutions cycle during the laboratory test using a pair of gear having specified values of Mn (normal module) = 4, β (helix angle) = 30 deg, and Lloyd’s K factor at 8 MPa.

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In this study, we aimed to develop a micromechanism in which constituent parts of lm order are used and to establish the handling technology required to achieve this. On the basis of the results of previous studies, we fabricated end effectors driven by a small piece of shape memory alloy (SMA) and succeeded in grasping microobjects on the order of 10-40 lm. However, when the size of an object is 10 lm or smaller, because this size is equivalent to the resolution of optical microscopes, it is necessary to improve and change the design of observation technology to manipulate much smaller objects. In this study, an SEM was used as the observation system and the manipulation system was modified to be compatible with this observation system. A manipulation system for grasping much smaller objects was designed and developed.