Worm Gear Drive optimization Considering Industry Constraints Based on Nature Inspired Algorithms

This paper presents a novel method to obtain optimum design for a worm gear drive used in sugar industries taking into account certain constraints of industrial relevance. The objective of this research is to minimize volume of worm gear drive. Gear ratio, face width and pitch circle diameters of worm and worm wheel are considered as design variables. Industry relevant constraints viz. gear strength capacity, wear capacity, thermal capacity, dynamic load, self locking, and face width are considered. Besides this other constraints such as maximum power transmission capacity, centre distances, deflection of worm and beam strength of worm are also considered. Nature inspired optimization algorithms, namely, Simulated Annealing (SA), Firefly (FA), Cuckoo Search (CS) and MATLAB solvers fmincon and GA are used for solving this problem in MATLAB environment. Results of simulation are analysed and presented.