Simulation of stress-magnetization coupling about magnetic memory effect of gear defects

As an important component in the transmission system, gear endures complex stress during the meshing process. The tiny defects of the gear are likely to occur after some amount of load cycles. This will lead to a huge economic loss if the tiny defects are not detected in time. Metal magnetic memory (MMM) technique can effectively find the early defects of ferromagnetic material and it has attracted great attentions. However, the mechanism of metal magnetic memory on ferromagnetic materials under loading and geomagnetic field has not been thoroughly addressed, and the studies on gear defects are rarely reported. This paper adopts the finite element analysis (FEA) software ANSYS to construct a defective gear model and the air around it. The contact-stress and magnetic flux leakage distribution is given through the stress-magnetization coupling model. The simulation results are in accord with the common MMM principle, which are helpful to the understanding of the stress-magnetization coupling mechanism and provide the gist for the further study of gears early defects detection based on MMM technique.