A Fatigue Model for Spur Gear Contacts Operating Under Mixed Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication Conditions

Abstract

This paper presents a model to predict the crack formation fatigue lives of spur gear contacts operating under mixed lubrication conditions where surface roughnesses introduce intermittent metal-to-metal contacts and severe stress concentrations. The proposed model consists of several submodels, including (i) a gear load distribution model to determine the normal tooth force distribution along the tooth surface, incorporating any profile modifications and manufacturing deviations, (ii) a mixed elastohydrodynamic lubrication model customized to handle transient contact conditions of gears, (iii) a stress formulation that assumes the plane strain condition to compute the transient elastic stress fields on and below the tooth surface induced by the mixed lubrication surface pressure and shear stress distributions, and (iv) a multi-axial fatigue model to predict the crack nucleation life distribution. The proposed spur gear fatigue model is used to simulate the contacts of gear pairs having different surface roughness amplitudes. The predictions are compared to the measured gear fatigue stress-life data for each surface condition to assess the model accuracy in the prediction of the crack nucleation fatigue lives as well as the location of the critical failure sites.