Engineers and designers can’t view plastic gears as just steel gears cast in thermoplastic. They must focus on special issues and considerations unique to plastic gears. Actually, plastic gear design requires focus on details which have no effect on steel gears, such as for example heat Scroll Vacuum Pumps build-up from hysteresis.
The basic difference in design philosophy between metal and plastic gears is that metal gear design is founded on the strength of an individual tooth, while plastic-gear design recognizes load sharing between teeth. In other words, plastic teeth deflect even more under load and spread the strain over more teeth. Generally in most applications, load-sharing escalates the load-bearing capability of plastic gears. And, consequently, the allowable tension for a specified number-of-cycles-to-failure increases as tooth size deceased to a pitch of about 48. Little increase sometimes appears above a 48 pitch due to size effects and other issues.
In general, the following step-by-step procedure will create an excellent thermoplastic gear:
Determine the application’s boundary circumstances, such as temperatures, load, velocity, space, and environment.
Examine the short-term materials properties to determine if the original performance levels are adequate for the application.
Review the plastic’s long-term home retention in the specified environment to determine if the performance levels will be taken care of for the life span of the part.
Calculate the stress amounts caused by the many loads and speeds using the physical property or home data.
Evaluate the calculated values with allowable stress amounts, then redesign if needed to provide an adequate safety factor.
Plastic material gears fail for most of the same reasons metal types do, including wear, scoring, plastic material flow, pitting, fracture, and fatigue. The reason for these failures is also essentially the same.
One’s teeth of a loaded rotating gear are at the mercy of stresses at the main of the tooth and at the contact surface area. If the gear is lubricated, the bending stress is the most important parameter. Non-lubricated gears, however, may wear out before a tooth fails. Therefore, contact stress may be the prime element in the design of the gears. Plastic gears usually have a complete fillet radius at the tooth root. Hence, they aren’t as susceptible to stress concentrations as steel gears.
Bending-stress data for engineering thermoplastics is based on fatigue tests run at specific pitch-collection velocities. Therefore, a velocity factor ought to be found in the pitch series when velocity exceeds the test speed. Continuous lubrication can boost the allowable tension by one factor of at least 1.5. As with bending stress the calculation of surface contact stress requires a number of correction elements.
For instance, a velocity element is used when the pitch-line velocity exceeds the test velocity. In addition, a factor is used to take into account changes in operating temperatures, gear components, and pressure angle. Stall torque is normally another factor in the look of thermoplastic gears. Frequently gears are subject to a stall torque that is significantly higher than the normal loading torque. If plastic material gears are operate at high speeds, they become vulnerable to hysteresis heating which may get so serious that the gears melt.
There are several approaches to reducing this type of heating. The favored way is to reduce the peak stress by increasing tooth-root area available for the required torque transmission. Another strategy is to lessen stress in the teeth by increasing the apparatus diameter.
Using stiffer components, a material that exhibits much less hysteresis, can also extend the operational lifestyle of plastic-type material gears. To increase a plastic’s stiffness, the crystallinity levels of crystalline plastics such as acetal and nylon could be increased by processing techniques that increase the plastic’s stiffness by 25 to 50%.
The most effective approach to improving stiffness is by using fillers, especially glass fiber. Adding glass fibers raises stiffness by 500% to at least one 1,000%. Using fillers has a drawback, though. Unfilled plastics have exhaustion endurances an purchase of magnitude greater than those of metals; adding fillers decreases this benefit. So engineers who would like to make 
use of fillers should look at the trade-off between fatigue existence and minimal high temperature buildup.
Fillers, however, do provide another benefit in the power of plastic material gears to resist hysteresis failing. Fillers can increase heat conductivity. This helps remove warmth from the peak stress region at the base of the gear teeth and helps dissipate high temperature. Heat removal is the various other controllable general aspect that can improve level of resistance to hysteresis failure.
The surrounding medium, whether air or liquid, has a substantial effect on cooling rates in plastic material gears. If a liquid such as an essential oil bath surrounds a equipment instead of air, heat transfer f
rom the gear to the natural oils is usually 10 times that of the heat transfer from a plastic material gear to atmosphere. Agitating the oil or air also enhances heat transfer by a factor of 10. If the cooling medium-again, surroundings or oil-is definitely cooled by a high temperature exchanger or through style, heat transfer increases even more.