Austempered irons and steels offer the design engineer alternatives to conventional material/process combinations. Depending on the material and the application, austempering may provide the producers of gear and shafts with the following benefits: ease of manufacturing, increased bending and/or contact fatigue strength, better wear resistance or enhanced dampening characteristics resulting in lower noise. Austempered materials have been used to improve the performance of gears and shafts in many applications in a wide range of industries.

When you're manufacturing fun, very often you need gears. The Addendum team recently went on a behind-the-scenes gear-finding mission with Jerold S. Kaplan, Principal Engineer, Show/Ride Mechanical Engineering at Walt Disney Imagineering in Lake Buena Vista, FL. We found that at least part of Disney's magic comes from good, old-fashioned mechanical engineering.

Editor's Note: The following article details the advantages of synthetic lubricants in certain applications. However, the user should be aware of certain design issues arising from the extract chemistry of the synthetic. For example, some synthetics may have low solvency for additives. Others may not be compatible with mineral oils or nonmetallic components such as seals and paints. Some synthetics may absorb water and may not have the same corrosion resistance as mineral oils. Finally, the user should consider biodegradability or toxicity before switching to any new lubricant. Many of these concerns are present in petroleum-based lubricants as well, so consult a lubrication specialist before specifying a lubricant.

During the last decade, industrial gear manufacturers, particularly in Europe, began to require documentation of micropitting performance before approving a gear oil for use in their equipment. The development of micropitting resistant lubricants has been limited both by a lack of understanding of the mechanism by which certain lubricant chemistry promotes micropitting and by a lack of readily available testing for evaluation of the micropitting resistance of lubricants. This paper reports results of two types of testing: (1) the use of a roller disk machine to conduct small scale laboratory studies of the effects of individual additives and combinations of additives on micropitting and (2) a helical gear test used to study micropitting performance of formulated gear oils.

This section is dedicated to what's new and what's happening in the world of gear inspection and metrology. Here you will find news about products, companies and organizations, services and events affecting the gear inspection and metrology industry.

Would you like to be able to see the condition of the gears in your transmissions without having to open the box and physically examine them? There is a way, and not too many people know about it. It's called Wear Particle Analysis, or ferrography, and it is just starting to get noticed.

The quality of the material used for highly loaded critical gears is of primary importance in the achievement of their full potential. Unfortunately, the role which material defects play is not clearly understood by many gear designers. The mechanism by which failures occur due to material defects is often circuitous and not readily apparent. In general, however, failures associated with material defects show characteristics that point to the source of the underlying problem, the mechanism by which the failure initiated, and the manner in which it progressed to failure of the component.

Helical gear pairs with narrow face width can be theoretically classified into three categories over the contact ration domain whose abscissa is the transverse contact ration and whose ordinate is the overlap contact ratio. There is a direct relation between vibration magnitude and shaft parallelism deviation. To clarify the effect of the tooth deviation types on the vibration behavior of helical gear pairs, performance diagrams on vibration are introduced. the acceleration levels of gear pairs are shown by contour lines on the contact ratio domain. Finally, the performance of gears with bias-in and bias-out modifications is discussed considering the effect of the shaft parallelism deviation with use of the developed simulator on a helical gear unit. It becomes clear that there is an asymmetrical feature on the relation between the vibration magnitude of a gear pair and the direction of each deviation.

Software Bits for January/February 2000.

Roughly 100 years ago, Cornelius J. Brosnan of Springfield, Massachusetts, invented and received the first U.S. patent for a paper clip. At about the same time, his fellow inventors were coming up with such marvels as the zipper, the safety razor and the typewriter.