Modeling and simulation of the gear micro-pitting formation mechanism for surface roughness

Abstract

A Micro-pitting damage is an early failure form of gear contact. Exploring its damage mechanism is very important to gear design, operation and maintenance. Considering the contact pressure distribution, sliding speed, rolling speed, film thickness and shear stress along the contact line, this paper takes into account the effect of the peak number of Gaussian surface roughness, and uses rheological methods to affect the crack initiation The number of minimum roughness peaks is calculated to simulate the crack initiation process, and a crack criterion method to predict the dangerous area of crack initiation is proposed. Then, considering the effect of accumulated stress, the topography of the contact surface gradually changes from a Gaussian rough surface to a non-Gaussian rough surface. Thus, after the crack initiation, this paper uses a non-Gaussian rough surface to further simulate the crack propagation process. The simulation results show that when the skewness of the non- Gaussian rough surface is constant, the crack propagation rate will increase with the increase in number of loads; when the skewness increases, the crack propagation rate will decrease.This paper first analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the existing micro-pitting crack initiation and propagation model, then modifies the crack initiation criterion based on the number of Gaussian surface roughness peaks, and simulates the crack propagation with non-Gaussian roughness. Finally, an example is used to simulate and analyze the established model.