Wear material determination and parameters optimization of an external gear pump by Taguchi technique

Abstract

Wear of a material in gear pump is affected by many parameters like hardness of the material and other operating parameters such as discharge, pressure, RPM etc. The hardness of the gear pump casing and gear, as a material parameter while RPM and discharge pressure are assumed as working parameters in this work to correlate simulated wear volume determined. Experimentation on gear pump was performed to check the effect of various parameters like pressure, discharge, efficiency etc. on performance of gear pump at regular interval of time. Archard model is applied here to determine the wear volume of a material surface using ANSIS workbench. The maximum volume loss due to wear has been obtained for the casing of defined hardness running at selected rpm and working pressure. In the next part of the work Taguchi analysis was carried out to found out the most affecting parameter on the performance of gear pump. Investigation of the various parameters like discharge pressure, hardness of casing material of pump and operating RPM on the wear of the external gear pump were explored by Taguchi technique. Factors affecting on the process with their optimization are determined using this method. After experimentation it is evident that wear volume of a material is affected by these factors and Taguchi approach is successfully implemented to identify the optimum parameters combination for achieving the best wear conditions for the external gear pump.