Abstract
The rolling contact fatigue (RCF) model is commonly used to predict the contact fatigue life when the sliding is insignificant in contact surfaces. However, many studies reveal that the sliding, compared to the rolling state, can lead to a considerable reduction of the fatigue life and an excessive increase of the pitting area, which result from the microscopic stress cycle growth caused by the sliding of the asperity contact. This suggests that fatigue life in the rolling-sliding condition can be overestimated based only on the RCF model. The rubbing surfaces of spiral bevel gears are subject to typical rolling-sliding motion. This paper aims to study the mechanism of the micro stress cycle along the meshing path and provide a reasonable method for predicting the fatigue life in spiral bevel gears. The microscopic stress cycle equation is derived with the consideration of gear meshing parameters. The combination of the RCF model and asperity stress cycle is developed to calculate the fatigue life in spiral bevel gears. We find that the contact fatigue life decreases significantly compared with that obtained from the RCF model. There is strong evidence that the microscopic stress cycle is remarkably increased by the rolling-sliding motion of the asperity contact, which is consistent with the experimental data in previous literature. In addition, the fatigue life under different assembling misalignments are investigated and the results demonstrate the important role of misalignments on fatigue life.
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Acknowledgements
This study is funded by National Science Foundation of China (No. 51875369) and General Projects of Basic Science and Frontier Technology Research of Chongqing (Nos. cstc2016jcyjA0511, cstc2018jcyjAX0451). Wei PU would like to thank Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. YJ201752).
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Wei CAO. He received his Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from Sichuan University, China, in 2019. Now, he is a lecturer at School of Construction Machinery, Chang’an University, China. His research interests are tribology, dynamics, and fatigue in transmission systems.
Si REN. She received her bachelor degree in electronics and information engineering from Sichuan University, China, in 2015. Now, she is a doctoral student in School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Sichuan University, China. Her research work covers the tribology of planetary gear and bevel gear.
Wei PU. He received his Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from Sichuan University, China, in 2017. He currently is an associate research fellow at School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sichuan University, China and a visiting scholar in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. His interests include the lubrication and friction in transmission components.
Ke XIAO. He received his Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from Chongqing University, China, in 2012. He is an associate research fellow at College of Mechanical Engineering, Chongqing University, China. His research interests are the nonlinear dynamic of flexible drive mechanism and system.
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Cao, W., Ren, S., Pu, W. et al. Microstress cycle and contact fatigue of spiral bevel gears by rolling-sliding of asperity contact. Friction 8, 1083–1101 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40544-019-0335-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40544-019-0335-x