Spalling Fatigue Life Assessment of Surface Hardened Sintered Gears Based on Fracture Mechanics

In order to evaluate the surface durability of surface-hardened sintered gears, the fatigue lives of 5 kinds of sintered gears and 28 kinds of sintered rollers under sliding-rolling contact conditions were examined and estimated based on the fracture mechanics. The sintered gears and rollers were surface-hardened by induction-hardening and ion-nitriding. The fatigue tests were conducted using a power circulating gear testing machine and two cylinder testing machines. The pore distributions included in the sintered materials were observed and were analyzed statistically. The failure mode of the sintered gears and roller was mainly spalling. The stress intensity factor obtained by FEM analysis for the mode II under a condition of Hertzian contact became larger as the crack length became longer. The estimation of fatigue life of the sintered gears and rollers was attempted using the pore distributions and the fracture mechanics. The estimated fatigue lives were almost the same as the tested fatigue ones. Therefore, it could be said that the crack propagation of the sintered gears and rollers depended on the pore size and hardness.