Cloud-based simulation of gear designs

The gearbox market in Europe earned revenues of €2,928.1 million in 2010. The market will reach €3,721.15 million in 2017. In Italy a large number of gear manufacturers is present, both Large Enterprises (LEs) and SMEs operate on the field of gear production, gear design and gearboxes. Typically, however, SME gear manufacturer are lacking skills and resources to develop complex models, to buy expensive software licenses to perform large-scale computations and hire highly skilled people having experience in stress analysis and gear design. The potential impact of the HPC Cloud based High Performance Gear Analyser (HPGA) will allow SMEs to reap the benefits of the most advanced methods for gear analysis. The development of HPGA draws on more than ten years of research in the field of gear transmissions. Recently, further development was impacted by the insufficient computational power of standard workstations, which limited further developments. It was clear that only HPC Cloud technologies would be able to make our software available for any design engineer with good performance. The software appears with a simple interface where the final user finds all standard input data of gears datasheets; in addition some popup menus are devoted to specific operations: create the geometry and check data coherence; create the model and perform analyses or optimizations; present results in a standard way acceptable for the world of gearing.