What's the perfect vacation destination for a gear aficionado? Aspen? Too trendy. Miami? Too humid. For a true machinery enthusiast, the perfect vacation is a gear museum road trip.
The purpose of this paper was to verify, when using an oil debris sensor, that accumulated mass predicts gear pitting damage and to identify a method to set threshold limits for damaged gears.
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 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.
Some of the pressure on American manufacturers seems to be letting up. This is welcome relief, considering the squeeze they have been under for the past few years.
Nobody's sure what went on in Bolsa Chica, CA, when gear-shaped stones were used there 8,700 years ago, but a popular belief is that at least some activity revolved around manufacturing.
Carbon steels have primarily been used to manufacture aerospace gears due to the steels' mechanical characteristics. An alloyed low carbon steel is easily case-hardened to obtain a hard wear surface while maintaining the ductile core characteristics. The microstructure achieved will accept the heavy loading, shocks, and elevated temperatures that gears typically experience in applications. The carbon steel machinability allows for general machining practices to be employed when producing aerospace gears versus the more advanced metal removal processes required by stainless and nickel-based alloys.
Gear manufacturers typically use plastic, steel or other metals to make their gears, but Andrew Shotts made his first gears out of sugar and chocolate.