Advanced Material Selection Technique For High Strength and Lightweight Spur Gear Design

Abstract

This study aims to select optimum materials for particular spur gear designs. An advanced material selection technique called Ashby's method was used to determine suitable materials according to their material index. The method requires objective function, constraint and free variables. Objective function was set to minimizing mass based on the bending strength whereas the bending fatigue failure criteria is the constraint. All the input parameters and modification factors during the design process were taken as free variables. The suitable materials were ranked according to their index value then subjected to gear designs. A number of gear designs were performed with different types of materials to show the differences between weights of the parts. Module and face width results were also compared between each other. Lightweight and high strength materials suitable for spur gear designs were found out. And up to 63% weight reduction was achieved compared to conventional gear materials.