LAUSR

Surface hardening heat treatment, including carburizing and quenching, is widely used to prevent wear and rolling contact fatigue of vehicle power transmission system parts such as gears. However, distortion that occurs during heat treatment processes can present problems for improving the precision of gear shapes. Predicting distortion behavior accurately by a heat treatment simulation method could help to achieve better heat treatment quality and accuracy of parts. A heat treatment simulation of a gear tooth was carried out in this work by using the heat transfer coefficient during a gear heat treatment process. The tooth surface was divided into nine parts with different heat transfer coefficients. It was found that the difference between the actual deformation and the calculated deformation was smaller compared with the application of a uniform heat transfer coefficient at the tooth surface. By considering the distribution of heat transfer coefficient on the tooth surface for width and height direction, the heat treatment deformation prediction result became more accurate. [doi:10.2320/matertrans.H-M2018816]