Integrated Heat-Treatment Simulation with Virtual Inspection of Distorted Gears

Heat-treatment simulation is a powerful tool for gear design and process troubleshooting, but many times the predicted gear distortion is difficult to compare to physical gear measurements and to required specification charts or measurements. To help ease this burden, two software programs are utilized to provide powerful gear analyses to heat-treatment simulation results. This paper briefly describes the software used, DANTE and Integrated Gear Design (IGD), and present a simple case study. In it, the stress and deformation from the heat treatment of a small gear made of AISI 5120 are predicted using DANTE. The distorted gear geometry is then imported into IGD and the predicted distortion is compared to the actual measurements of the gear.