Determination of Material and Fracture Properties of a Case-Hardened Planet Gear and Its Homogenisation Method to Obtain the Damage Mechanism Caused by Fragment Ingestion

Before a new type of engine is introduced into civil aviation, it must comply with various safety regulations. These regulations include the analysis of secondary damage caused by the re-ingestion of a tooth fragment. The purpose is to prevent crack propagation through the gear rim, which would lead to catastrophic failure. In this context, identification of the initial crack location is crucial to determine the crack propagation path. Therefore, this paper presents a technique to determine and validate a constitutive material model and fracture locus for case-hardened spur gears. As the modelling of the surface-hardened layer is computationally intensive, it is necessary to homogenise the model. This paper comprehensively reviews and discusses the associated effects and errors. To determine the plastic behaviour of the case-hardened external gear (30CrNiMo8) and the nitrided internal gear (35CrAlNi7-10), the widely acknowledged Johnson–Cook material model is implemented using compression and Vickers indenter tests to define the necessary parameters. The fracture locus implementation is also based on the Johnson–Cook method and an axial shift of the fracture locus based on the hardness profile of the spur gears is determined by quasi-static pulsator tests. For validation, a project-specific gearbox test rig is used, enabling consistent ingestion of defined fragments. In addition, to check the likelihood of a tooth flank crack and to validate the results, a simplified ingestion experiment is performed.