scope:

Enhancing design, loads, and life of transmission components through innovative steel solutions

It is becoming more and more apparent that material properties can and will play a greater role than before in supporting the challenges most transmission manufacturers are facing today. Making use of materials' intrinsic fatigue properties provides a new design tool to support the market changes taking place, where current and future designs will require cleaner steels that can perform at higher load levels.

This paper discusses the potential gain for the transmissions industry by making use of material properties to support more demanding applications. It describes advanced engineering steels and how they can benefit the industry, through discussing material cleanliness versus performance of gear materials, standardized fatigue testing such as contact and bending fatigue as well as machining of clean steel. Full-scale rig testing along with standardized fatigue testing have provided data supporting the gain in performance when moving from conventional steels to clean steels, showing the potential to increase torque and/or downsize through new designs. The value of, for example, having the same design generation running longer is immense, as manufacturing only needs minor adjustments and can be further optimized without large investments.

In moving to clean steel, many process steps, including machining, need to be properly evaluated. Therefore, a number of machining trials have been performed comparing clean steel to commonly used conventional steel. In this paper, machining such as turning and gear and spline cutting is discussed, based on a number of recent studies. All studies indicate that by optimizing machining parameters such as tooling inserts, along with ensuring suitable material microstructure, the productivity and efficiency of these processes can be maintained or even improved.