Gears are one of the most crucial parts of power transmission systems in various industrial applications. Recently, there emerged a need to design gear drivers due to the rising performance requirements of various power transmission applications, such as higher load-carrying capacity, higher strength, longer working life, lower cost, and higher velocity. Due to their excellent properties, gears with asymmetric teeth have been designed to obtain better performance in applications. As the rotation speed of the gear transmission increases, the dynamic behavior of the gears has become a subject of growing interest. The most important contributing factor of dynamic behavior is the stiffness of the teeth, which changes constantly throughout the operation. The calculation of gear stiffness is important for determining the load distribution between the gear teeth when two sets of teeth are in contact. The primary objective of this article is to develop a new approach to calculate gear mesh stiffness for asymmetric gears. With this aim in mind, single tooth stiffness was calculated in the first stage of the study using a finite element method. This study presents crucial results to gear researchers for understanding spur gears with involute asymmetric teeth, and the results will provide researchers with input data for dynamic analysis.

Stainless-steel has become a widely preferred material type in the marine, aerospace, sanitary, industrial equipment, and construction industries due to its superior corrosion resistance, high mechanic properties, high strength, formability, and thermal and electrical conductivity. In this study, a multi-objective optimization method based on grey relational analysis was employed to optimize the fiber laser-cutting parameters of cutting speed, focal position, frequency, and duty cycle. Surface roughness and kerf width, which are the two most important parameters that determine laser-cutting quality, were simultaneously optimized. In order to assign the optimum level of each parameter individually, the Taguchi technique was applied. The cutting surface morphology was examined according to the grey relational grade with a 3D optical profilometer, and maps of the cutting surfaces were created. According to the results achieved using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), it was seen that the parameters that affected surface roughness and kerf width the most were duty cycle, with a contribution rate of 49.01%, and frequency, with a contribution rate of 31.2%. Frequency was the most important parameter in terms of multiple responses, with a contribution rate of 18.55%. Duty cycle and focal position were the second and third most effective parameters, respectively. It was determined that the optimum parameter values for minimum surface roughness and minimum kerf width that could be obtained with the fiber laser cutting of 20 mm thick AISI 304L (DIN EN 1.4301) material were 310 mm/min cutting speed, −11 mm focal position, 105 Hz frequency, and 60% duty cycle.