Load bearing capacity investigation and coating failure mechanism for coated spur gears

Spur gears are the most common type of gears for industry, due to its simple structures and low costs of manufacture. Under the complex loading conditions, failures can easily occur in the form of de-bonding, pitting, spalling or crushing of coating structures. Failure may originate from initiation of cracks, and its growth and propagation, however, basic failure mechanism is still not clear. In order to investigate the failure mechanism of coating structure failure for the spur gears, this paper presents some understandings about the coating damage at the teeth flank of a spur gear, based on a novel Finite Element simulation-procedures. This modeling procedure was developed based on several modeling approaches including: parameterized FE modeling, Cohesive-Zone Model and sub-modeling technique. The numerical model of spur gear was based on 42CrMo4 steel with PVD coating deposited as TiN/CrN multilayer structures. It was found that greater load bearing capacity exist for spur gears with the coating of nitride states deposited on 42CrMo4 steel.