What are the advantages and disadvantages of plastic gears

Although plastic gears are relatively "mature" recently, many products on the market still use steel gears. But in fact, it is difficult to get rid of the humiliation and worry about the use of plastic gears, which should be traced back to the application of plastic gears in other non critical applications of various toys.

However, with the progress of plastic resin and manufacturing skills, plastic gears can now be used in a variety of critical applications, from transmitting torque to positioning core components in medical equipment. Plastics bring many benefits, with the design intent of flexibility and obvious cost savings.

Plastic gears have many advantages over gears made of metal. Plastic gears are lighter, have less sound, maintain inherent lubrication and are resistant to corrosion; They can produce many varieties, such as bevel gear, offset bevel gear, spiral bevel gear, helical gear, metric gear, metric spur gear, plastic worm gear, etc. Cam, lug, rib, web, shaft and hole can be molded into an integrated plastic gear through a single exercise, which can reduce the production resources of gear processing plants.

This type of versatility paves the way for almost endless application of programs, including iHF combiner gears, helical gears, cars, mixers, converters, conveyors, electronic products, feeder drives, food processing, home and garden, indexing, ocean steering, material handling, medicine, mixers, film animation, office machines, packaging, paper processing, energy transmission regulators, printing, punching machines, robots, semiconductors.

The plastic gear is molded, and the coaxiality is difficult to ensure, but the tooth profile is the most accurate than the metal gear. Because the precision of the gear cavity processed by wire cutting is higher than that of the gear cavity processed by rolling electrode. The plastic gear has the advantages of light weight, low noise, etc. The large, continuous and repeatable shrinkage characteristics of engineering plastics in the mold cavity need to be considered and compensated during gear molding. Generally, the diameter tolerance of plastic gear is larger than that of metal gear.

Source: Lightning Eight Diagrams