This paper reviews the necessity for detailed specification, design and manufacture to achieve required performance in service. The precise definition of duty rating and a thorough understanding of the environmental conditions, whether it is in a marine or industrial application, is required to predict reliable performance of a gearbox through its service life. A case study relating to complex marine gears and other general practice is presented to review the techniques used by Allen Gears to design and develop a gearbox that integrates with the requirements of the whole machinery installation. Allen Gears has considerable experience in the design of a variety of industrial and marine gears(Ref. 1,2).

The effort described in this paper addresses a desire in the gear industry to increase power densities and reduce costs of geared transmissions. To achieve these objectives, new materials and manufacturing processes, utilized in the fabrication of gears, and being evaluated. In this effort, the first priority is to compare the performance of gears fabricated using current materials and processes. However, once that priority is satisfied, it rapidly transforms to requiring accurate design data to utilize these novel materials and processes. This paper describes the effort to address one aspect of this design data requirement.

The need for improved power transmissions that use gears and gearboxes with smaller overall dimensions and with lower noise generation has left manufacturing engineers searching for different methods of gear processing. This search has led to the requirement of hardened gears.

The selection of the proper steel for a given gear application is dependent on many factors. This paper discusses the many aspects related to material, design, manufacture, and application variables. The results of several studies on the optimization of alloy design for gas- and plasma- carburization processing and reviewed.

Carburized gears have higher strengths and longer lives compared with induction-hardened or quench-tempered gears. But in big module gears, carburizing heat-treatment becomes time-consuming and expensive and sometimes cannot achieve good hardness due to the big mass-effect. Also, it is not easy to reduce distortion of gears during heat treatment.

Compared to non-heat-treated components, case-carburized gears are characterized by a modified strength profile in the case-hardened layer. The design of case-carburized gears is based on defined allowable stress numbers. These allowable stress numbers are valid only for a defined "optimum" case depth. Adequate heat treatment and optimum case depth guarantee maximum strength of tooth flank and tooth root.

In recent years, improvements in the reliability of the vacuum carburizing process have allowed its benefits to be realized in high-volume, critical component manufacturing operations. The result: parts with enhanced hardness and mechanical properties.

Traditionally, high-quality gears are cut to shape from forged blanks. Great accuracy can be obtained through shaving and grinding of tooth forms, enhancing the power capacity, life and quietness of geared power transmissions. In the 1950s, a process was developed for forging gears with teeth that requires little or no metal to be removed to achieve final geometry. The initial process development was undertaken in Germany for the manufacture of bevel gears for automobile differentials and was stimulated by the lack of available gear cutting equipment at that time. Later attention has turned to the forging of spur and helical gears, which are more difficult to form due to the radial disposition of their teeth compared with bevel gears. The main driver of these developments, in common with most component manufacturing, is cost. Forming gears rather than cutting them results in increased yield from raw material and also can increase productivity. Forging gears is therefore of greater advantage for large batch quantities, such as required by the automotive industry.

In recent years, the demands for load capacity and fatigue life of gears constantly increased while weight and volume had to be reduced. To achieve those aims, most of today's gear wheels are heat treated so tooth surfaces will have high wear resistance. As a consequence of heat treatment, distortion unavoidably occurs. With the high geometrical accuracy and quality required for gears, a hard machining process is needed that generates favorable properties on the tooth surfaces and the near-surface material with high reliability.

Economic production is one of the main concerns of any manufacturing facility. In recent years, cost increases and tougher statutory requirements have increasingly made cutting fluids a problematic manufacturing and cost factor in metalworking. Depending on the cutting fluid, production process and supply unit, cutting-fluid costs may account for up to 16% of workpiece cost. In some cases, they exceed tool cost by many times (Ref. 1). The response by manufacturers is to demand techniques for dry machining (Ref. 2).