From injection moulded thermoplastic gears to assembled complex actuators: Calculation of plastic gears as basis for the design of automotive actuators

摘要

For many, usually small, electrical actuators, which are required for automotive or medical-technical applications, injection moulded plastic gears are used in combination with metal gears or in combination with other plastic gears. As the properties of plastic parts depend on several factors like temperature or moisture and so on, it is a challenge to be able to calculate and simulate gear pairs exactly because of the complexity. This means general tests and a big database is desired to be able to speed up the development of gears and gearboxes. At Oechsler AG it was decided to do not only direct application tests for the gears or actuators but general tests for spur gears too. Some samples and results are shown out of the available results and how they can be used during development process. The results are from several tests done with spur gears of module 1mm according to VDI 2736 [1], which is describing calculation methods and tests.