Design Against Tooth Interior Fatigue Fracture

In a modern truck, the gear teeth are among the most stressed parts. Failure of a tooth will damage the transmission severely. Throughout the years, gear design experience has been gained and collected into standards such as DIN (Ref. 1) or AGMA (Ref. 2). Traditionally two types of failures are considered in gear design: tooth root bending fatigue, and contact fatigue. The demands for lighter and more silent transmissions have given birth to new failure types. One novel failure type, Tooth Interior Fatigue Fracture (TIFF), has previously been described by MackAldener and Olsson (Refs. 3 & 4) and is further explored in this paper.