Planetary gear mechanisms are widely used in automobile automatic transmissions. However, the relevant design theories are not well development, especially the synthesis of the clutching sequence. Thus, the purpose of this study is to develop a systematical methodology for the design of automobile automatic transmissions. First, the specifications are established according to the characteristics of the automatic transmissions. Second, a procedure is created to list the speed ratio table and the clutching table for the planetary gear mechanisms. Third, based on the clutching table, a systematical method is developed to synthesize the clutching sequences. Then, the clutches and brakes are arranged into the planetary gear mechanisms to form the schematic of an automatic transmission. Finally, according to the relations between speed ratios and the numbers of teeth of gears, the gear-teeth synthesis is carried out when several certain speed ratios are assigned. A seven-link 2-DOF Ravigneaux gear mechanism, a eight-link 2-DOF Ravigneaux gear mechanism and a nine-link 2-DOF stepped Ravigneaux gear mechanism are as the design examples. And a four-speed, a six-speed and an eight-speed automatic transmissions are synthesized, respectively. The result of this study shows that the proposed methodology can be applied to design any 2-DOF planetary automatic transmissions.

An epicyclic-type automatic transmission is a device which is connected from engine to driving wheels, and the main purpose is to maintain the revolution speed of engine to be in a desired working range while accelerating or decelerating the automobile. The epicyclic -type automatic transmissions in production are mostly Ravigneaux-type epicyclic mechanisms, and in recent year, the development of automatic transmissions for automobile is oriented to the orientation of setting an single epicyclic gear mechanism instead of the input to bring various inputs of revolution speed to increase the total number of speed ratios of an automatic transmission, and such type of epicyclic is called combinational epicyclic-type automatic transmissions for automobiles. For the incompletion in the relative design methodology, a systematic methodology of designing mechanism and clutching-sequence of combinational epicyclic-type automobile transmission is described. First, fundamental principle of the combination and operations of automatic transmissions are analyzed to establish the design requirements. Second, a procedure of structure synthesis of combinational epicyclic-type automobile transmission is brought up which the planar graphic method is applied for. Third, based on Speed Ratio Relationship of each clutching sequence, a procedure of gearing-sequence is introduced. Finally, on the basis of the analytic method, the teeth of gears is to be clarified. The result of this work obtains five types of the combinational epicyclic-type automatic transmissions which could reach six speeds.

An automatic transmission is a device that is connected to the back of an engine and sends the power from the engine to the drive wheels. Its job is to keep the engine within a certain angular velocity. Although there are many epicyclic-type automatic transmissions in production, the related configuration design methods are still tedious and prone to human error. A simple and analytic methodology needs to be developed. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to present an efficient methodology for the systematic design of the epicyclic gear transmissions for automobiles. First, fundamentals and gear-shifting operations of the four-speed, five-speed and six-speed epicyclic-type automatic transmissions are illustrated to establish the design requirements. Second, based on the kinematic equations of the fundamental geared entities and the corresponding basic gear ratios, a procedure is applied to execute the kinematic and mechanical-efficiency analyses for the automatic transmissions. Third, two simple clutching-sequence synthesis methods are proposed and illustrated. One is based on the speed ratio equations, and another is based on the lever diagram. Next, a planar-graph representation is presented to arrange the desired clutches for each possible clutching sequence into the epicyclic gear mechanism. Then, the number of teeth of each gear is synthesized from assigning two or three desired speed ratios by the analytic method. Finally, a computer-aided design program for the clutching-sequence synthesis is developed with the considerations of the design requirements. With the above methods, the systematic designs of the 204 epicylic gear mechanisms are given for demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed methodology. The result of this work shows that the seven-link two-DOF epicylic gear mechanisms, the eight-link two-DOF Ravigneaux gear mechanism, and the nine-link two-DOF parallel-connected epicylic gear mechanisms could reach four-, six-, and six-forward speeds at most, respectively.