Applying advanced mechano-chemical surface treatment for optimizing gear production process

Different factors including durability, efficiency and noise, must be considered to meet gear performance requirements. Gear performance approach should not only ensure that gear box life matches the expected total aggregated driving distance, especially for future EVs, but also open the path to more sustainable and cost-effective solutions. To improve gear performance, heat- and surface-treatment processes are applied, in which they consume energy, cost and time. Also, they involve environmental impacts, especially the phosphating process. So, optimizing the currently applied process is needed to investigate the possibility of reducing time, cost and environmental impacts by removing certain steps in the process or modifying them.

Moreover, material selection should also be looked at to examine the material role in optimizing the whole process. This should be possible by applying a developed surface treatment. Triboconditioning® which is a mechano-chemical surface treatment, has been applied as an additional surface treatment but not as part of an alternative process. Previous studies and research projects showed a good potential to reduce surface friction, wear and pitting by adding Triboconditioning® as an additional surface treatment. However, none of them have studied modifying the currently applied manufacturing steps by including mechano-chemical surface treatment for reducing the production time and cost as well as the environmental impacts.

The current research project aims to study several technologies together to develop an optimized heat- and surface-treatment approach for vehicle gear production. Mechano-chemical surface treatment method with a changed surface chemistry and roughness is to be integrated into existing methods for developing an alternative production process to enhance gear performance with minimal environmental footprint and reduced production time and cost. The target will be achieved by studying different combinations by applying mechano-chemical surface treatment against the currently applied heat- and surface-treatment methods.

Moreover, material variation is to be investigated to examine the impact on the developed treatment approach. The developed surface treatment will be applied to high load gear transmissions with focus on gear performance. The intended outcome is to achieve at least the same performance but with less environmental impact and reduced overall production process time and cost.

The application of mechano-chemical surface treatment method is to be introduced and studied in this project as a replacement treatment and as a part of a developed alternative gear production process. The expected results will be of great benefits to a wide production sector. The research project is led by Örebro University (ORU), in collaboration with Tribonex and Cummins companies for developing a new mechano-chemical surface treatment and developing an optimized gear production process.