Working of Worm Gears and its Uses

For nonparallel, nonintersecting, right angle gear drive system applications where there is a requirement of high transmission gearing ratio, there comes the wide use of worn and wheel gears. worm gearbox and reducers generally give you a more compact solution when you compare them with other gear, belt, and chain transmission elements. In certain configurations, you will observe that a worm and wheel gear set can provide you sufficient high friction to become self-locking which can be an apt feature if a defined position is needed for a gear train if it is not braked or unpowered.

With right or left-hand threads and teeth the manufacturing of worms and worm gears is done. The determination of the hand of a worm or worm gear can be done by observing the direction in which the threads or teeth lean when the worm gear has positioned the hole facing upwards. You will find that in the worm and gear there are the same pitch, number of threads, hand, and tooth dimensions. They should even have the same pressure angle and the lead angle. We consider right-hand worm gearbox and worm gear sets as standards.

Working of Worm Gears 

To the worm, an electric motor or engine applies rotational power. The screw face pushes on the teeth of the wheel and the worm rotates against the wheel. Then against the load, the wheel is pushed.

Uses of Worm Gear 

Reasons, why a worm gear would be selected over a standard gear, are as follows:

The high reduction ratio is the first reason. With little effort, a worm gear can have a massive reduction ratio and one must thing to do is adding circumference to the wheel.

The inability to reverse the direction of power is the second reason to use a worm gearbox in China. It becomes virtually impossible for a wheel with force applied to it to start the worm moving just because of the friction between the worm and the wheel.

On a standard gear, once there is enough application of force then the input and output can be tuned independently. To a standard gearbox, this necessitates adding a backstop resulting in increasing the complication of the gear set.