Additive Miniaturized-Manufactured Gear Parts Validated by Various Measuring Methods

Abstract

Recently, miniaturization has become an important topic to both scientists and engineers. The manufacturing trends are following the compact size manufactured-components. Miniaturization challenges engineers to obtain smaller size of the components, to reduce their weights & power consumption and to take less space utilization. The functional specifications of the parts must be clarified beforehand, so that the functions are not lost in miniaturization. With consideration of the geometrical product specification (GPS), it is possible to better limit the functional properties and thus succeed in miniaturization. In this work, the problems with the reduction of the gear components are explained and the subsequent assessment are presented with different methods such as contact and noncontact metrology methods. Tactile and optical methods are used to determine the surface structure. Coordinate measuring machines (CMM) are one of the geometry based tactile methods. The optical methods give more information about the geometry and microstructure of technical surfaces by using computed tomography (CT) and confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM). According to the measurement results, the measurement data belonging to CMM measurements for the partial circles showed the same results with CT measurements. The surface roughness values were varied from the existed geometry to the miniaturized geometry using CLSM. In porosity measurement with CT, porosity decreased in the micro geometry of the gear components. The miniaturized geometry had less porosity related to the gaps volume, than the normal geometry. The minimum gap volumes depend on the scanning resolution in CT. The gaps in macro geometry were logically more frequent than the micro geometry.