Sights Inside the Virtual Engineering Education - Web-Based Engineering Education: Critical Design and Effective Tools - page 165

The second example is a software to teach the
gears and the interaction between the gears to the
students. This subject usually it is not deeply clear
to the students. The influence of corrections on the
change of the geometry or the undercut phenomenon
is most of the times a complicated subject. For this
purpose laboratory sessions may help them to figure
out the mechanism, but this needs the laboratory be-
ing equipped with a milling machine or some kind
of milling system able to cut the gear profile out of
a cylindrical piece of metal. Then, according to the

course time and the disbarments to the course, just
few specimens may be cut to show the students, or
the same specimens should be showed at each year.
To solve these limits, purpose-oriented software
has been developed by the authors in order to repre-
sent different gears geometry to the students.
In Figure 4a a simple approach to gears-cut is
presented. The virtual rotation without slipping of
a rack on a smooth circle is creating the shape of
the gears. As shown in Figure 4b, several possible
position of the rack can be visualized.

Figure 4. Gear simulation by Gears-Cut software