Bending Fatigue Strength of Austempered Ductile Iron Spur Gears

Abstract

This paper deals with an experimental evaluation of bending fatigue strength for austempered ductile iron (ADI) spur gears. The module is 2.5 and the number of teeth is 26 in the test gears. The material of the test gears corresponds to Japan Industrial Standard (JIS) FCAD1100-15. Some gears are processed by one of two types of fine particle bombarding (FPB). The surface roughness is slightly increased by FPB. The obtained strengths are 623 MPa for the as-austempered gears, and 1011 and 1085 MPa for the gears after FPB. The strength is expressed by the fillet stress level, which is calculated by FEM. The strength of a gear with the same dimensions made of carburized SCr420H alloy steel is 1205 MPa, and the strength of the ADI gear is approximately half that of the carburized steel gear. The FPB process has a significant effect on the ADI gear, improving its strength by 62-74%.