Fracture Failure Analysis of Gear Teeth

Abstract Gears are important transmission components in the field of aviation industry. Failure cases such as fatigue fracture and fatigue spalling often occur due to poor conditions, and the status of teeth surface is usually one of the important elements for the failure cause analysis, but few have analyzed how the machining status of gear end surface affects the fracture failure. In this paper, one engagement failure of two gears was studied, and the failure phenomenon is as follows: all teeth of the driving gear fractured, two adjacent teeth of the driven gear fractured and several locations of teeth bottom cracked. According to the fracture morphology of the gear, it is judged that the driven gear fatigue-cracked firstly, and the fatigue zone is located at the lower end surface rather than the tooth bottom. Material structure, machining status of gear end surface, and the thickness of nitriding layer were inspected. In addition, the difference of the machining status between the lower and the upper end surface was analyzed. The results show that compared to the upper end surface, the lower end surface is smoother and the grinding amount is relatively larger. The residual stress tested by XRD shows that there is a residual compressive stress of about 84 MPa on the upper end surface and a residual tensile stress of about 238 MPa on the lower end surface. The tensile stress and the working stress cause the local stress level of the lower end surface of the gear to be higher than the fatigue strength, causing fatigue cracking from the lower end surface.