Development and Wear Analysis of Polymer-Polyeryl Ether Ketone (PEK) Spur Gear

Abstract

Gears are very useful components which transmits motion and power in mechanical power transmission system and industrial rotating machinery. A spur gear generally is subjected to two types of stresses i.e bending stress and contact stress which causes tooth failure during meshing with another gears tooth.Surface wear is considered to be one of the four major failure modes in gear systems, the other three being tooth bending, fatigue, contact fatigue, and scoring. Gears are subjected to large amount of wear while in motion. It’s difficult to control the amount of wear. Gears are generally made from metallic materials but recently advanced polymers were developed which have sufficient strength and properties similar to the metallic materials so they can easily replace the metallic gears .So the work that has been carried out in this project was to find a suitable polymer material which will replace metallic gear where wear is major concern.One such polymer is PEK (Polyeryl Ether Ketone).PEK polymer materials finding its application where component is subjected to high amount of wear due to its high wear resistance capacity. The three materials used in this work are PEK, Nylon and Cast iron.