Virtually every mechanism that has movement, includes gears. From watches to locomotives to airliners, gears transmit, reduce or increase rotation speed, or reverse direction of moving parts. Gears are one of the most complicated mechanical parts to make and often the dependability of something as sophisticated as the modern automobile relies on a gear the size of a salt shaker.
Newage Testing Instruments is an A2LA accredited organization with a long history of suppling
Rockwell and
Microhardness testers to measure the complicated hardness of gears.
Gears rely on heat treatment that create a specific case hardness on the surface of the teeth. This case must have a high hardness to resist wear for long life. But this case must be backed by a softer but much tougher core that resists impacts that prevents failure of the gear itself. A surface hardness that is too low will lead to premature wear, while a case that is too hard can lead to teeth breaking or gears cracking.
Newage Testing Instruments has developed automated micro-hardness testers that allow the measurement and documentation of cross-sectioned samples of case hardness parts to be completely automated. Performing a traverse for case depth analysis is so fast that it can be used for real time process control.
Traditional Case Hardness using Vickers measurements requires multiple Indentation measurements on highly polished samples to determine at what point from the surface of the part a specific hardness is reached.
C.A.M.S. Computer Aided Measurement System in combination with a dedicated micro-hardness tester provides an automatic measurement of the Vickers indentations and completely removes the operator influence.
For even greater speed, the
MT-91 microhardness tester uses the
Rockwell test method. Hardness is measured from the depth of penetration, rather than using an optical system to determine the hardness based on the size of a Vickers impression. This not only vastly speeds up the measurement process, but also vastly reduces the polishing needed to accurately measure the samples. Entire case depth measurements can be made in minutes, with an individual test cycle of 6 seconds, what took hours can now take minutes.
These systems can store predetermined test sequences and also chart data from an individual part or overly a number of case depth charts to give an historical prospective of the heat treatment process.
Typical applications for Gear testing include
- Automotive transmissions
- Instrumentation
- Heavy Truck
- Agricultural components
- Aerospace
- Appliance
- Power transmission