Polymer gears find increasing applications in the automotive industry, office machines, food machinery, and home appliances. The main reason for this success is their low cost. Their low weight, quietness of operation, and meshing without lubricant are also interesting. However, they have poor heat resistance and are limited to rotational transmission. In order to improve the gears' behavior, glass fiber is added

Plastic gears still have an entire frontier to explore, and how they measure up against their steel cousins is a question still being investigated.

This paper proposes a new method — using neural oscillators — for filtering out background vibration noise in meshing plastic gear pairs in the detection of signs of gear failure. In this paper these unnecessary frequency components are eliminated with a feed-forward control system in which the neural oscillator’s synchronization property works. Each neural oscillator is designed to tune the natural frequency to a particular one of the components.

This paper presents an original method for computing the loaded mechanical behavior of fiber reinforced polymer gears. Although thermoplastic gears are unsuitable for application transmitting high torque, adding fibers can significantly increase their performance. The particular case of polyamide 6 + 30% glass fibers is studied in this paper.

Can my metal gear(s) be replaced with plastic gears?

Automotive industry embraces proven yet evolving technology of plastic gears.

Gleason-K2 Plastics eliminates weld lines with no machining.

This paper seeks to compare the data generated from test rig shaft encoders and torque transducers when using steel-steel, steel-plastic and plastic-plastic gear combinations in order to understand the differences in performance of steel and plastic gears.

Eliminating noise, weight and wear proves valuable in 2012.