Gunther Shepard Beall
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 0
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Gear teeth experience contact conditions that vary continuously as they pass through the meshing zone. Thus, not only the sizes but also the positions of surface defects become critical to their scuffing survivability. High-speed gearbox cost and reliability can be improved by quantifying these features and determining their impact on scuffing performance. Pursuant to this, representative defects in the form of scratches are applied in two batches to the contacting surfaces of high-quality spur gear specimens. These, along with an undamaged baseline gear pair, are then tested through a staged scuffing matrix incrementally increasing the operating load, speed, and lubricant temperature. Metrological procedures developed to quantify scratch parameters and track surface damage are used initially and throughout testing to document evolvement of the surfaces. It is concluded that (i) larger scratches generally decrease scuffing performance, (ii) the location of scratches is critical to scuffing performance; scuffing was never observed in areas where sliding velocities were low, (iii) increased wear and heat generation are observed on defects in high-sliding regions, and (iv) wear and tribo-film formation improve the scuffing performance of scratched gears. In addition, thermal elastohydrodynamic lubrication simulations are performed to confirm that increasing scratch width and surface sliding velocities have the most influence on increasing the lubricant flash temperatures.