Gear Materials (Reading Material)
Gears are manufactured from a wide variety of materials, both metallic as well as nonmetallic. As is the case with all materials used in design, the material chosen for a particular gear should be the cheapest available that will ensure satisfactory performance. Before a choice is made, the designer must decide which of several criteria is most important to the problem at hand. If high strength is the prime consideration, a steel should usually be chosen rather than cast iron. If wear resistance is the most important consideration, a can be made, for problems involving noise reduction, nonmetallic. Materials perform better than metallic ones. However, as is true in most design problems, the final choice of a material is usually a compromise. In other words, the material chosen will conform reasonably well to all the requirements mentioned previously, although it will not necessarily be the best in any one area. To conclude this discussion we will consider the characteristics of various metallic and nonmetallic gear materials according to their general classifications.
Cast Irons Cast iron is one of the most commonly used gear materials. Its low cost, ease of casting, good machinability, high wear resistance, and good noise abatement property make it a logical choice. The primary disadvantage of cast iron as a gear material is its low tensile strength, which makes the gear tooth weak in bending and necessitates rather large teeth.
Another type of cast iron is nodular iron, which is made of cast iron to which a material such as magnesium or cerium has been added. The result of this alloying is a material having a much higher tensile strength while retaining the good wear and machining characteristics of ordinary cast iron.
Very often the combination of cast iron gear and a steel pinion will give a well balanced design with regard to cost, strength, and wear.
Steel gear are usually made of pain carbon steels or alloy steels. They have the advantage, over cast iron, of higher strength without undue increase in cost. However, they usually require heat treatment to produce a surface hard enough to give satisfactory resistance to wear. Unfortunately, the heat treatment process usually produces distortion of the gear, with the result that gear load is not uniformly distributed across the gear tooth face. Since alloy steels are subject to less distortion due to heat treatment than carbon steels, they are often chosen in preference to the carbon steels.
Although it is not the purpose here to discuss the various heat treatment methods and their effect on the properties of materials so treated, the designer should be aware of possible problems arising from the use of heat treated materials.