Research Project: Lifetime Extension of Pittings

For case-hardened gears, pitting damage occurs first on the weakest tooth. The other teeth are only pre-damaged or completely intact until failure (4% pitting area). Thus, there is a variation in the strength of the individual teeth and, at the same time, a potential for unused lifetime. The objective of this work is to use this potential to increase the remaining useful life of gears directly in operation by means of an adaptive operating strategy. Within the strategy, a local load reduction is applied to the pre-damaged tooth, thus delaying degradation. The other intact teeth compensate for the load reduction in order to achieve a constant average power, which represents a considerable advantage over the state of the art.

> detailed project description (.pdf)