The author has written this book primarily from the viewpoint of analyzing vibrations on heavy industrial and mill gearing that may have been in service for a prolonged time. The purpose is to diagnose problems, especially the source or cause of failure. However, the principles and analysis techniques can be used for all types and sizes of gears, as well as for gear noise analysis.
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.
Face-milled hypoid pinions produced by the three-cut, Fixed Setting system - where roughing is done on one machine and finishing for the concave-OB and convex-IB tooth flanks is done on separate machines with different setups - are still in widespread use today.
The goal of gear drive design is to transit power and motion with constant angular velocity. Current trends in gear drive design require greater load carrying capacity and increased service life in smaller, quieter, more efficient gearboxes. Generally, these goals are met by specifying more accurate gears. This, combined with the availability of user-friendly CNC gear grinding equipment, has increased the use of ground gears.
Quality gear manufacturing depends on controlled tolerances and geometry. As a result, ferritic nitrocarburizing has become the heat treat process of choice for many gear manufacturers. The primary reasons for this are:
1. The process is performed at low temperatures, i.e. less than critical.
2. the quench methods increase fatigue strength by up to 125% without distorting. Ferritic nitrocarburizing is used in place of carburizing with conventional and induction hardening.
3. It establishes gradient base hardnesses, i.e. eliminates eggshell on TiN, TiAIN, CrC, etc.
In addition, the process can also be applied to hobs, broaches, drills, and other cutting tools.
Gear noise associated with tooth surface topography is a fundamental problem in many applications. Operations such as shaving, gear grinding and gear honing are usually used to finish the gear surface. Often, gears have to be treated by a combination of these operations, e.g. grinding and honing. This is because gear honing operations do not remove enough stock although they do create a surface lay favorable for quiet operation. See Fig. 1 for typical honing process characteristics. Gear grinding processes, on the other hand, do remove stock efficiently but create a noisy surface lay.
For over 50 years, grinding has been an accepted method of choice for improving the quality of gears and other parts by correcting heat treat distortions. Gears with quality levels better than AGMA 10-11 or DIN 6-7 are hard finished, usually by grinding. Other applications for grinding include, but are not limited to, internal/external and spur/helical gear and spline forms, radius forms, threads and serrations, compressor rotors, gerotors, ball screw tracks, worms, linear ball tracks, rotary pistons, vane pump rotators, vane slots, and pump spindles.
Rotary gear honing is a crossed-axis, fine, hard finishing process that uses pressure and abrasive honing tools to remove material along the tooth flanks in order to improve the surface finish (.1-.3 um or 4-12u"Ra), to remove nicks and burrs and to change or correct the tooth geometry. Ultimately, the end results are quieter, stronger and longer lasting gears.