The complete Industry News section from the May 2014 issue of Gear Technology.

How does one perform a contact analysis for worn gears? Our expert responds.

The turbines are still spinning. They’re spinning on large wind farms in the Great Plains, offshore in the Atlantic and even underwater where strong tidal currents offer new energy solutions. These turbines spin regularly while politicians and policy makers— tied up in discussions on tax incentives, economic recovery and a lot of finger pointing—sit idle. Much like the auto and aerospace industries of years past, renewable energy is coping with its own set of growing pains. Analysts still feel confident that clean energy will play a significant role in the future of manufacturing—it’s just not going to play the role envisioned four to five years ago.

A study was performed to evaluate fault detection effectiveness as applied to gear-tooth pitting-fatigue damage. Vibration and oil-debris monitoring (ODM) data were gathered from 24 sets of spur pinion and face gears run during a previous endurance evaluation study.

The powder metal (P/M) process is making inroads in automotive transmission applications due to substantially lower costs of P/M-steel components for high-volume production, as compared to wrought or forged steel parts. Although P/M gears are increasingly used in powered hand tools, gear pumps and as accessory components in automotive transmissions, P/M-steel gears are currently in limited use in vehicle transmission applications. The primary objective of this project was to develop high-strength P/M-steel gears with bending fatigue, impact resistance and pitting fatigue performance equivalent to current wrought steel gears.

A single tooth bending (STB) test procedure has been developed to optimally map gear design parameters. Also, a test program on case-carburized, aerospace standard gears has been conceived and performed in order to appreciate the influence of various technological parameters on fatigue resistance and to draw the curve shape up to the gigacycle region.

As is well known in involute gearing, “perfect” involute gears never work perfectly in the real world. Flank modifications are often made to overcome the influences of errors coming from manufacturing and assembly processes as well as deflections of the system. The same discipline applies to hypoid gears.

In the past two years DSM has been conducting fatigue tests on actual molded gears in order to provide design data.

A method to extrapolate running gear bending strength data from STF results for comparing bending performance of different materials and processes.

This is part II of a two-part paper that presents the results of extensive test programs on the RCF strength of PM steels.