This paper will primarily focus on the prediction of gear temperature of plastic gears using numerical heat transfer model based on 3D Finite Difference (FDE) method. It is quite common that in most of the applications, the plastic gears are self-lubricated. Tooth surface wear is an important failure mode in plastic gears, and this primarily occurs because at significantly higher loads, the surface temperature might increase to a value close to the melting point of the material, thereby changing the surface behavior. Thus, it is critical to compute the temperature of the gear pair in an accurate fashion. The heat source is the frictional heat dissipation due to sliding of the gears. The model is capable of solving for both helical and spur gears. Since the gear tooth experiences a repetitive heating and cooling cycle for every rotation, the heat input is averaged over one rotation of tooth and is independent of time. The program computes both the surface and body temperature of the gears as a function of space and time. Because of the inherent nature of the implicit FDE method, there is no restriction on the discretization both in the time and space domains. This reduces the simulation time to a great extent without much compromise in accuracy. The results are correlated with experimental data, and the good agreement is achieved between the test and simulation results for different cases of load and speed. This simulation was developed for plastic gears and can be extrapolated to metal gears, with the greatest challenge being obtaining the accurate heat transfer coefficients for lubricated gears.
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