An experimental investigation of gear spalling phenomena

This paper presents an experimental study of spalling of gear teeth contact surfaces. The gear rig and experimental procedure are described. Three pairs of gears were tested under different loading conditions and the results for one of them are reported in this paper. The spalling of the gear teeth contact surface as observed using a scanning electronic microscope are presented and described together with the optical microscope observations of wear particles trapped by filtergrams made from oil samples taken from the gear rig. The spalling features, in terms of shape and depth, are in a good agreement with the authors' predicted results which were obtained from linear elastic and elastic-plastic finite element analyses previously reported by authors.(1,2)