| Abstract: | Scuffing of gears involves the welding together of locally unprotected metal‐to‐metal contacts when critical limits of pressure and temperature are exceeded. Protection can be maintained by a thick lubricant film, by physically adsorbed layers, or by chemical reaction layers. At higher temperatures, viscosity and film thickness decrease but, using an EP gear oil, due to higher chemical reactivity, the scuffing load capacity is not necessarily reduced accordingly. The reaction temperature of the additives is not always reached for large gears. In this paper the factors that influence the scuffing load capacity are investigated, and test possibilities and calculation methods are outlined. |
