Engineers and designers can’t view plastic gears as just steel gears cast in thermoplastic. They need to focus on special issues and considerations unique to plastic gears. Actually, plastic gear design requires focus on details which have no effect on metal gears, such as for example heat build-up from hysteresis.
The essential difference in design philosophy between metal and plastic gears is that metal gear design is based on the strength of an individual tooth, while plastic-gear design recognizes load sharing between teeth. Basically, plastic teeth deflect more under load and spread the strain over more teeth. In most applications, load-sharing escalates the load-bearing capability of plastic gears. 
And, consequently, the allowable tension for a specified number-of-cycles-to-failure increases as tooth size deceased to a pitch around 48. Little increase is seen above a 48 pitch due to size effects and various other issues.
In general, the following step-by-step procedure will generate a good thermoplastic gear:
Determine the application’s boundary circumstances, such as heat, load, velocity, space, and environment.
Examine the short-term material properties to determine if the original performance levels are adequate for the application.
Review the plastic’s long-term home retention in the specified environment to determine whether the performance levels will be taken care of for the life span of the part.
Calculate the stress levels caused by the many loads and speeds using the physical home data.
Evaluate the calculated values with allowable stress amounts, then redesign if needed to provide an sufficient safety factor.
Plastic gears fail for most of the same reasons metallic types do, including wear, scoring, plastic material flow, pitting, fracture, and fatigue. The cause of these failures is also essentially the same.
The teeth of a loaded rotating gear are subject to stresses at the root of the tooth and at the contact surface area. If the gear is lubricated, the bending stress is the most crucial parameter. Non-lubricated gears, however, may degrade before a tooth fails. Therefore, contact stress is the prime element in the design of these gears. Plastic gears usually have a complete fillet radius at the tooth root. Thus, they aren't as susceptible to stress concentrations as metal gears.
Bending-stress data for engineering thermoplastics is founded on fatigue tests run at specific pitch-collection velocities. Consequently, a gear box for greenhouse velocity factor should be used in the pitch collection when velocity exceeds the check speed. Constant lubrication can boost the allowable tension by one factor of at least 1.5. As with bending tension the calculation of surface contact stress takes a number of correction factors.
For instance, a velocity factor is utilized when the pitch-collection velocity exceeds the check velocity. In addition, a factor can be used to account for changes in operating temperatures, gear components, and pressure position. Stall torque is normally another factor in the design of thermoplastic gears. Frequently gears are at the mercy of a stall torque that's significantly higher than the normal loading torque. If plastic gears are operate at high speeds, they become susceptible to hysteresis heating which may get so serious that the gears melt.
There are several methods to reducing this type of heating. The favored way is to lessen the peak stress by increasing tooth-root area available for the required torque transmission. Another approach is to reduce stress in the teeth by increasing the gear diameter.
Using stiffer components, a material that exhibits less hysteresis, can also expand the operational existence of plastic material gears. To increase a plastic’s stiffness, the crystallinity degrees of crystalline plastics such as acetal and nylon could be increased by digesting techniques that boost the plastic’s stiffness by 25 to 50%.
The most effective method of improving stiffness is to apply fillers, especially glass fiber. Adding glass fibers raises stiffness by 500% to 1 1,000%. Using fillers has a drawback, though. Unfilled plastics have exhaustion endurances an order of magnitude greater than those of metals; adding fillers reduces this advantage. So engineers who would like to make use of fillers should take into account the trade-off between fatigue lifestyle and minimal heat buildup.
Fillers,
however, perform provide another advantage in the ability of plastic material gears to resist hysteresis failure. Fillers can increase warmth conductivity. This helps remove temperature from the peak tension region at the base of the gear tooth and helps dissipate high temperature. Heat removal is the various other controllable general factor that can improve level of resistance to hysteresis failure.
The encompassing medium, whether air or liquid, includes a substantial effect on cooling rates in plastic material gears. If a fluid such as an essential oil bath surrounds a gear instead of air, high temperature transfer from the apparatus to the oils is usually 10 instances that of the heat transfer from a plastic material gear to atmosphere. Agitating the essential oil or air also boosts heat transfer by one factor of 10. If the cooling medium-again, atmosphere or oil-is definitely cooled by a temperature exchanger or through design, heat transfer increases a lot more.