A Theoretical Approach to the Shift Mechanics of Rubber Belt Variators

This paper proposes a theoretical description of the mechanical behavior of rubber belt variators during the speed ratio shift. Comparing with the steady operation, the mass conservation of the belt is completely reformulated considering an elementary dihedral control volume between two planes through the pulley axis and balancing the inside mass variation with the total mass flux through the control surface. On the other hand, the belt equilibrium conditions are similar to the steady case, as the inertia forces due to the shifting motion are negligible with respect to the other forces. Assuming a one-dimensional belt model, it is shown that adhesive regions may appear inside the arc of contact, where the belt sticks to the pulley flanges along spiral-shaped paths. It is demonstrated that this type of contact may occur only for the closing pulleys, differently from the steady drives and from the opening pulleys, where only quasiadhesive internal subregions may be observed at most, where the sliding velocity turns out to be quite small along a more or less extended portion of the arc of contact. Numerical solutions are calculated for all types of conditions, and their characteristics are widely described.