What Is A Sintered Gear?

The production method of sintered metal gears is to press metal powder into the desired shape, and then heat treat it to form a continuous metal structure with fine pores to retain lubricating oil. Moreover, sintered metal gears are an indispensable part of many equipment nowadays. Do you understand the advantages and manufacturing steps of using sintering method for sintered metal gears?

Advantages of sintering:

1. Complex shapes

Sintering allows complex shapes to be obtained directly from compaction tools without the need for any mechanical processing, such as teeth, splines, contours, frontal geometry, etc.

2. High dimensional accuracy

The achievable tolerance perpendicular to the compaction direction is usually IT 8-9 sintering, which can be increased to IT 6-7 after sizing. The length of IT 10-13 depends on the geometric shape of the components. Additional machining operations can improve accuracy.

3. Excellent surface smoothness

The surface characteristics of sintered components are the presence of flat areas with very low roughness and scattered depressions corresponding to porosity. This surface condition is superior to processed forged materials, which have a series of peaks and valleys. The presence of lower peaks can reduce the running in time of components.

4. Mass production

The reliability and repeatability of large-scale production, the stability of cutting tools, the technical complexity of production equipment, and the SPC control system provide high reliability and repeatability for sintered components in large-scale production.

5. Self lubrication

The interconnected pores of the materials can be filled with oil to obtain self-lubricating bearings.