There exist cases where precise simulations of contact forces do not allow modeling the gears as rigid bodies but a fully elastic description is needed. In this paper, a modally reduced elastic multibody system including gear contact based on a floating frame of reference formulation is proposed that allows very precise simulations of fully elastic gears with appropriately meshed gears in reasonable time even for many rotations. One advantage of this approach is that there is no assumption about the geometry of the gears and, therefore, it allows precise investigations of contacts between gears with almost arbitrary non-standard tooth geometries including flank profile corrections.

This study presents simulation results that show how this modal approach can be used to efficiently investigate the interaction between elastic deformations and flank profile corrections as well as their influence on the contact forces. It is shown that the elastic approach is able to describe important phenomena like early addendum contact for insufficiently corrected profiles in dependence of the transmitted load. Furthermore, it is shown how this approach can be used for precise and efficient simulations of beveloid gears.