Induction hardening of a spur gear

Heating of the 10 cm 45 teeth gear up to the austenitization temperature performed with overnight simulation, taking into account changes of magnetic properties over Curie temperature. You can get hardening profile without cutting the gear and optimise frequency within in a couple of days.

The 10 cm gear hardening with one concentric inductor at 170 kHz and 1.9 kA over 120 ms

A gear can be numerically simplified cutting a sector of a half-tooth. Even more, the sector can be shorten in height keeping results of the simulation accurate. By applying the symmetry boundary conditions to the cutting faces, we speed up calculation more than 100 times. The study is prepared less than in an hour.

The simulation predicts temperature distribution in the gear over time for various frequencies. The post-processing also allow to show the austenized area – red at the image. The image demonstrates the results at 2.5kA and two different frequences: 100kHz (right) and 170kHz (left). Thus, simulation helps to choose an optimal frequency for gear hardening without cutting the gear.

Symmetry boundary conditions

CENOS Induction Heating simulation software supports two types of boundary conditions: Flux normal and Flux parallel (see the image). As it was shown here, by using these conditions, you can cut only the sector of a gear in get accurate 3D result just in few hours.

Moreover, the powerful post-processing tool allows to represent results in nice pictures and video with whole gear, like it is demonstrated here.

Also read: Large gear tooth-by-tooth hardening simulation

CENOS Platform is a 3D simulation software that is focused specifically on induction heating and uses open source components and algorithms, making it affordable for small and medium companies.

Ask our support engineers (info@cenos-platform.com) more about the induction heating simulation capabilities with CENOS Platform and get your first simulation test project done in a few days!