Following is the second part of an article begun in our last issue. The first part covered basic shot peening theory, shot peening controls, and considerations that should go into developing a shot peening specification. Part II covers optional peening methods and the relationship of shot peening specifications to the drawings.
A simple, closed-form procedure is presented for designing minimum-weight spur and helical gearsets. The procedure includes methods for optimizing addendum modification for maximum pitting and wear resistance, bending strength, or scuffing resistance.
Shot peening is widely recognized as a prove, cost-effective process to enhance the fatigue characteristics of metal parts and eliminate the problems of stress corrosion cracking. Additional benefits accrue in the areas of forming and texturizing. Though shot peening is widely used today, the means of specifying process parameters and controlling documents for process control are not widely understood. Questions regarding shot size, intensity, and blueprint specification to assure a high quality and repeatable shot peening process are continually asked by many design and materials engineers.
This article should answer many of the questions frequently asked by engineering professionals and to further assist companies interested in establishing a general shot peening specification.
Metrology is a vital component of gear manufacturing. Recent changes in this area, due in large part to the advent of computers, are highlighted in this article by comparison with more traditional methods.
Today, as part of filling a typical gear hobbing or shaping machine order, engineers are required to perform an SPC acceptance test. This SPC test, while it is contractually necessary for machine acceptance, is not a machine acceptance test. It is a process capability test. It is an acceptance of the machine, cutting tool, workholding fixture, and workpiece as integrated on the cutting machine, using a gear measuring machine, with its work arbor and evaluation software, to measure the acceptance elements of the workpiece.
The finished gear engineer, the man who is prepared for all emergencies, must first of all know the basic design principles.
Next he must be well versed in all sorts of calculations which come under the heading of "involute trigonometry."
This method of testing large gearboxes or, indeed, any power transmission element, had numerous advantages and offers the possibility of large savings in time, energy, and plant, if the overall situation is conducive to its use. This usually requires that several such units need to be tested, and that they can be conveniently connected to each to each other in such a way as to form a closed-loop drive train. No power sink is required, and the drive input system has only to make up power losses. The level of circulating power is controlled by the torque, which is applied statically during rotation, and the drive speed. Principles, advantage, and limitations are described, together with recent experiences in the only known large-scale usage of this technique in Australia.
Whether gear engineers have to replace an old gear which is worn out, find out what a gear's geometry is after heat treatment distortion, or just find out parameters of gears made by a competitor, sometimes they are challenged with a need to determine the geometry of unknown gears. Depending on the degree of accuracy required, a variety of techniques are available for determining the accuracy of an unknown gear. If a high degree of precision is important, a gear inspection device has to be used to verify the results. Frequently, several trial-and-error attempts are made before the results reach the degree of precision required.
This is the final part of a three-part series on the basics of gear lubrication. It covers selection of lubricant types and viscosities, the application of lubricants, and a case history
Spur gear endurance tests were conducted to investigate the surface pitting fatigue life of noninvolute gears with low numbers of teeth and low contact ratios for the use in advanced application. The results were compared with those for a standard involute design with a low number of teeth. The gear pitch diameter was 8.89 cm (3.50 in.) with 12 teeth on both gear designs. Test conditions were an oil inlet temperature of 320 K (116 degrees F), a maximum Hertz stress of 1.49 GPa (216 ksi), and a speed of 10,000 rpm. The following results were obtained: The noninvolute gear had a surface pitting fatigue life approximately 1.6 times that of the standard involute gear of a similar design. The surface pitting fatigue life of the 3.43-pitch AISI 8620 noninvolute gear was approximately equal to the surface pitting fatigue life of an 8-pitch, 28-tooth AISI 9310 gear at the same load, but at a considerably higher maximum Hertz stress.