Research Information System
2nd International Conference on Innovative Studies of Contemporary Sciences, Tokyo, Japan, 17 - 19 August 2020, pp.102
Gears made from plastic materials, the properties of which are constantly being developed, have begun
to be widely used in a number of applications such as the automotive, textile, agricultural and food
industries, although steel gears are still highly due to their high mechanical properties. On the other
hand, wearing is one of the most important problems with gears. For this purpose, the wear behavior
of plastic gears was investigated in this study. In order to compare to the wear behavior of steel gears,
plastic gears were also made of Polyoxymethylene (POM) plastic material. The weight and tooth
thickness of the steel and POM gears were equal to each other, and the sizes (dimensions) of the gears
were determined by the modification of the module and the diameters of the gears. In addition, two
different types of gears, which are spur and helical gear, were produced to investigate the wear
behaviors of the gears made of steel and POM materials. The effects of variable load and rotational
speed on the wear behavior of the gears were studied using the gear-on-gear wear testing method. The
wear behavior of the gears was determined by calculating the weight loss of the samples. Under the
same loads and speeds, the weight loss of the helical gears was lower than in the steel and POM spur
gears. The weight loss in the gears increased with an increase of the load and the speed. The wear
resistance of the steel and POM gears at the same weight was close to each other. It was concluded
that helical POM gears can be preferred over steel gears in some applications due to the advantages of
plastic gears, such as low cost and high corrosion resistance.