Impact of Dressing Spindle Thermal Error on Gear Surface Accuracy in Discontinuous Profile Grinding of Gears: Mechanism Analysis and Compensation

Abstract Discontinuous profile grinding of gears is a critical manufacturing process for high-precision gears. However, a significant phenomenon observed in its applications is the propagation of thermal error from the dressing spindle to the gear tooth surface via the wheel dressing and subsequent gear grinding, severely affecting gear surface accuracy. The mechanism of this phenomenon remains unclear, and effectively mitigating the detrimental impact of dressing spindle thermal error remains an unsolved issue. To reveal this mechanism, this study analyzes the dressing spindle thermal error, to quantify its impact on gear profile deviation, helix deviation, and pitch deviation. To address this issue, a novel thermal error prediction model based on POA-LSTM (pelican optimization algorithm and long short-term memory) is proposed and implemented for active compensation. Comparative experiments involving thermal error compensation were conducted, accurately measuring the dressing spindle thermal error, the accuracy of grinding wheel profile dressing, and the final gear surface accuracy before and after compensation. The experimental results validated the proposed mechanism analysis for the dressing spindle thermal error on gear surface error and confirmed the effectiveness of the compensation, which reduced the dressing spindle thermal error to within 0.5 μm and the cumulative pitch error (FP) of the workpiece gear by at least 45.4%.