Contact Pattern Development of the CH-53K MGB with Split-Path Gear-Train

The US Marines CH-53K King Stallion replaces the venerable CH-53E Super Stallion and delivers almost triple the payload over the primary mission radius of 110 nm, while maintaining the same shipboard footprint. In order to achieve this the main gearbox design had to achieve an unprecedented power density. The main gearbox is a split torque gear box with three input clusters and four dual herringbone drive pinions per cluster. This paper addresses the challenges related to contact pattern development of the MGB 3rd-stage gear meshes.