Design and Development of Graphene reinforced Acetal copolymer plastic gears and its performance evaluation

Abstract

Gears are one of the most critical components in a mechanical power transmission system and most industrial rotating machinery. Metallic gears are more expensive, high noise, high wear and friction during its operating conditions, for avoiding difficulties the metallic gears are replaced by plastic gears.polymers are having self-lubrication properties,better wear resistance, lower friction, low noise and cost, where as these properties are not sufficient for high load conditions.For improving or strengthening the material by reinforcing filler in to polymer. Within this present work initially graphene filler material has been prepared through modified Hummers method on a bulk scale. After that composites with varying weight percentages of grapheme i.e 0.5,1, 1.5, 2% in Acetal copolymer has been fabricated through injection molding process. The prepared composites have been tested for their mechanical and tribological properties based on the obtained results 1.5% filler composition has been found to be optimum when compared with other various combinations of the composition. So 1.5% graphene filled Acetal copolymer composites were used to design spur gears and analysis has been carried out through FEM. These analyses concludes that 1.5% graphene reinforced Acetal copolymer gears were found to be much more superior in case of performance, weight and cost compared to the both metallic and other polymer gears.