A REVIEW ON TRIBOLOGICAL PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS OF PLASTIC GEARS

Polymers are presently broadly utilized as substitute material for steel gear in low load devices. Its malfunction differs from gears made of steel, thus it is imperitive to sort out the failures shown by polymer gears. Numerous earlier studies noted that wear recognition, microstructure surface condition monitoring, weight loss and temperature detection can be used in the analysis for the failure of polymer gear. The principle objective of the current work is to conduct an analysis for failure detection methods as defined above. Other researcher works were studied and their findings were extracted in order to identify the methods they used. The most common method used was wear detection and it was supplemented by other methods such as microstructure surface condition monitoring. Failures shown by polymer can be concluded to be tooth breakage, tooth deformation, material removal and surface fatigue