GEAR MAKING


Neidig, “making such precise components for devices that serve the fossil fuel and renewable energy sectors requires a combination of sophisticated hardware and software.”


“When you have equipment containing gears that is buried underground and you spend a lot of money getting it then you darn well better expect that


it’s going to function properly and that it’s going to last for a while.”


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The key hardware at ITAMCO are the gear grinders it uses to generate coarse pitch external gearing and helical internal gearing. The software used with this equipment is Autodesk Product Design Suite, which includes 3D design simulation, collaboration and visualization tools that aid in gear manufacturing.


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The hardware/software combination, Neidig noted,


means “ITAMCO is able to manufacture gears to submicron tolerances. This precision is important because the more precisely manufactured a gear is, the better it will perform. A tighter tolerance and more accurate fit means less noise and vibration issues, which can cause other components to fail.”


Not just the Forces of Nature


Neidig also made note of the fact that gear quality is important in the oil & gas industry because the gears are not just subjected to temperature and climate extremes but also are acted upon by significant mechanical forces. For instance, the platform of an offshore jack-up rig “can often weigh as much as 6000 tons [5444 t]” and is raised and lowered “much the way a car jack raises up a car one ratchet at a time; the rig is raised and lowered by up to 54 helical planetary gear units connected by racks and pinions.” Drives used in fracking use gears to deliver as much as 3000 hp (2237 kW) to release oil and natural gas trapped in rock. Young of Forest City Gear said that the material a gear is


made from is important in this regard as well. “We work in all different materials,” said Young, “carbu- rized materials such as 8620, a common one in the power industry that gives you a very hard outside case that’s going to wear well and the alloys in the steel give it some malleabil- ity and flexibility so that it has high strength as well as high hardness. It gives it some shock resistance [to the mechani- cal forces] so it’s not brittle. We also work in exotic materials like titanium that offer great heat resistance or can exist in very cold temperatures and not fail.”


The Importance of Heat Treating Another strategy for making harder and stronger gears is


heat treating. According to John Gottschalk, director of special prod- ucts at Surface Combustion (Maumee, OH), the applications typically used for heat treating gears are through hardening, carburizing, induction hardening and nitriding. Surface Com- bustion has manufactured industrial heat treating equipment and thermal systems since 1915. “Carburizing is the preferred method due to strength


requirements,” he said, “with nitriding making some gains related to improvement in distortion due to lower temperature processing.” Nitriding is, indeed, a much lower-temperature process, operating at 950°F (510°C). Carburizing, on the


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