Design and Development of Hybrid Single Rod Gear Shift Lever (SRGSL) System With Extra Degree of Freedom

Manual Gear shifting mechanism is a customer touch point in vehicle driving conditions and it is a frequently used functional part of the vehicle. Inherent challenges exist to develop a gear shifting system that achieves better comfort shifting gears in manual transmissions, i.e. gear shift levers should be comfortable, efficient and reliable. There are several traditional concepts available for designing a mechanical interface for gear shift system like cable GSL (Gear Shift Linkages), mechanical GSL, engine mounted SRGSL (single rod gear shift linkages), directly transmission mounted GSL. All are having pros and cons over another.

A unique attempt is made to provide an efficient single rod type gear actuation system for commercial vehicle where one end is directly mounted on the cowl floor of the bus/Truck and another end is connected to transmission lever. Spherical ball mechanism is used for shifter lever mounting on cowl floor and lower part of this lever is connected to single rod through a yoke type mechanism. This paper is about the design & simulation part of this hybrid type single rod design which makes it vibration free, efficient, and reliable. The floor mounted spherical joint angle is optimized in kinematic simulation to take care of undesirable phenomena of gear pop out in all driving conditions and parallel makes it highly efficient joint with minimum friction.