I suppose if there's a "sci.engr.mechanical" group I should post it there
-- but r.c.m has some smart mechanical types, and s.e.c may still have some lurkers who might come out of the woodwork for this one.
So here's a question for the mechanical engineers in the group(s).
I was giving a seminar on control systems last week, and had the embarrassment of not only having a huge mathematical error in one of my slides, but had one of the smarter audience members question my underlying assumptions -- and I didn't have answers for either problem while standing there.
The basic problem is this:
If I'm putting a gearbox into a control system, and I have a data sheet (or measurements) for the gearbox that tell me it's efficiency in the designed direction of power transfer (usually when it's gearing down), I would like to know what its efficiency is in the backward direction.
In other words, if I have a gearbox with a gear-down ratio of K:1 and
100% efficiency, then when I drive a torque into the thing I should get K * torque out. But what I really get is K * torque * efficiency.I know both from experimentation with one sample, and from working out the math, that if I have a single-stage worm gear that I try to back- drive, its efficiency in the backward direction is pretty close to
h_b = h_f / (1 - 2 * h_f), where h_f is the efficiency in the forward direction.
But I don't know if this is general to all gearboxes, or even to all worm gear trains -- it's quite possible that I messed up my calculation and then lucked out on the one sample that I experimented on.
So -- anyone know? Are there any mechanical engineering texts that I should buy to check up on this?