Numerical and experimental investigation of splashing oil flow in a hypoid gearbox.

The oil distribution and churning loss are the main concerns in the design of a lubrication system for a gear transmission. This article describes a numerical method of simulating the splashing oil flow in a hypoid gearbox, obtaining the oil distribution, and calculating the churning loss. A three-dimensional numerical model is built to simulate the complex oil flow when hypoid gears splash oil inside the box. The volume of fluid (VOF) model is applied to describe the oil-air two-phase flow characteristics. In addition, the flank-moving technique is introduced to overcome the difficulty of generating cells in the tooth-meshing zone. To validate the numerical approach, a test rig is designed to observe the oil distribution in the gearbox and measure the churning loss of the hypoid gears. The comprehensive experimental investigation illustrates that the numerical results correspond well with the measured results. The results of this article show that the numerical method can accurately predict the complex oil flow in a hypoid gearbox and provide a numerical approach for investigating the oil flow and churning loss inside real-vehicle axle housing. This model can serve as a design optimization tool in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]