Rolling contact fatigue in heavily loaded gear transmission contacts

This thesis examines the influence of asperities such as found on the teeth of gears and discs, and failure mechanisms associated with rough surface Elastohydrodynamic Lubrication (EHL). The principal outcomes of the research provide a good insight into fatigue life, residual stress effects, damage prediction and surface contact failures. In particular, the study is intended to provide understanding into the residual stress distribution resulting from plastic deformation of surface asperities in the running in process. The residual stress is then added to the asperity elastic stress distribution and examined in detail to see the effects on fatigue damage and fatigue life. So, a theoretical model has been developed to assist design against the residual stress effect and surface contact fatigue, such as micropitting. The technique used in the study starts with developing an elastic plastic model of the rough surface by using the Abaqus Finite Element analysis software package. This is a nonlinear problem and ranges of applied loads have been applied to the as-manufactured surfaces causing the asperity features to experience varying degrees of plastic deformation. The pre and post running roughness profiles are studied in order to assess the level of plastic deformation actually occurring at significant surface asperity features by aligning the pre and post running profiles. This results in a new technique that has helped to identify the level of plastic deformation occurring in the practice, and also to make a comparison with FEA contact analysis for the same asperity features to identify the appropriate residual stress field. The residual stress field associated with the plastic deformation was extracted and evaluated. The extracted residual stress field was transferred to a form that facilitated IV inclusion in stress evaluation code to obtain the stress history for the material subject to loading in an EHL contact. The research carried out considers surface fatigue analysis with and without a residual stress field, so as to establish the influence of asperity plastic deformation on the fatigue properties of the surface. All the work is based on numerical simulation of surface fatigue failure in EHL situations and carried out numerically. The procedure can be applied quickly and gives the opportunity to apply several models and investigate the influence of all the model parameters on material deformation and fatigue life