Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1997

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Advanced Technologies

The application of computer aided design is more and more effective for the designer and manufacturer. It can create some available libraries for the users, we can retrieve and edit them quickly for the new designed process and can communicate with the other CAD/CAM system. This thing has an important significance in Engineering because it saves so much time of designer which is often repeating and tedious. Gears are present in most machines. They play an inevitably important role in transmitting power of machines in many industry fields such as automobile, air-plane, tractor, machine tool, etc. The spiral bevel gear has the best qualification when comparing with the others of gears. Spiral bevel Gear up to now were still manufactured by specific machines, the gear surface quality is usually not stabilised. Therefore, to get the considered shape of gears it is required to have the high accuracy machines , high professional levels of worker and high cost. This research aims to apply of CAD/CAM technologies in the metal cutting field. Especially, the tendency of using CNC machine for manufacturing Spiral bevel Gear is the best solution which can satisfy almost the required specifications of spiral bevel gears. In order to be able to machine spiral bevel gears on CNC machine, a five axis CNC machine with SD contouring control is required. A CAD/CAM system with 5 axis tool path generation capabilities is necessary and a standard postprocessor is also required.