ZAKGEAR design and analyses software for the worm gear is used for the following:

1. Predict contact area and contact movement.

2. Design oversized or modified cutting tool.

3. Calculate manufacturing settings.

4. Calculate sliding, rolling and efficiency of the gear set.

5. Contact and bending stress.

6. Create CAD models of the gears.

7. Gear inspection.

Correctly designed worm gear has a localized contact pattern. Localization of the contact is requied because of the misalignments in assembly and deflections. If the worm gear is made with 100% contact pattern (not localized) even very small misalignment can cause operating noise. The picture below shows a moving contact pattern on an incorrectly design worm gear.

As one can see the contact line (red) is starched all the way along the gear tooth. A small misalignment will result in edge contact and increased noise.

The next picture shows a correctly design worm gear with localized contact pattern.

As one can see from the following picture the tooth contact does not move on the edge of the tooth when the torque increased. The correctly designed worm gear will be quiet and run smoothly.

The localized contact pattern is achieved by cutting the gear with slightly oversized hob cutter. The cutter design and the positioning of the cutter on the gear-cutting machine can be produced with use of ZAKGEAR software. ZAKGEAR software allows to design low noise worm gears by optimizing of the gear cutter parameters and prediction of the tooth contact. Before ZAKEAR software was available for use in production the worm gears were cut in a number of iterations in order to achieve the optimized positioning of he cutter. Sometime it was necessary to modify the cutter in order to achieve low noise worm gear mesh. ZAKGEAR worm gear software accurately simulates the gear cutting and the gear mesh. With ZAKGEAR software the cutter design and the manufacturing setups will be calculated correctly so the manufacturing iterations are not required. Using of ZAKGEAR software reduces the development cost of each new worm gear set for up to $10,000.00US or more.