Studies on industrial three stage planetary gears to enhance durability

Abstract

Manufacturers worldwide are searching for new ways to newlinedramatically enhance the quality of products at reduced cost. Meeting the newlinechallenges of increasing global competition is not possible with conventional newlineindustrial processes. The wear and the fracture in gears are the major and newlinewidely recognized industrial problem. In the past three decades, many newlineresearchers have extensively studied and investigated the causes of failure and newlinesuitable damage detection techniques for machine parts like shaft, bearing and newlinegear. However, the faults still occur at any time on rotating machinery which newlineleads to harmful results or delay in production. It is essential to detect any newlineproblem at an early stage to prevent unexpected breakdown. In this research work, a planetary gear system consisting of three newlinestages (stage I, stage II and stage III) of gear sets causing breakdown in the newlineproduction of an industry has been selected. Each gear set of the planetary newlinegear system consists of a sun gear, ring gear and planet gears (3 nos.). It is newlineobserved that the gear sets in stage I and stage II fail frequently and cause newlinehuge losses to the company due to reduced production and quality of the newlineproducts. Therefore, different experimental and simulation studies are newlinecarried out on the gears used in stage I and stage II of the planetary gear newlinesystem. Visual examinations, Material identification, Vickers hardness newlineanalysis, Optical microstructure analysis, Scanning Electron Microscope newlinestudies, XRD analysis and Wear studies (Pin-on-disc method) and Finite newlineElement Analysis for simulating the behaviour of materials under various newlinestudies such as Vickers Hardness, Stress Analysis and Wear simulation are newlinethe techniques used in this study. newline