Fatigue performance evaluation of shot-peened gears

In the last fifty years many theories were developed with the aim of investigating the fatigue performance on mechanical components, but were generally not applied to shot-peened components. In this work case-hardened and shot-peened gears were tested in order to evaluate their fatigue limit and the local S-N curve at the tooth root. The same problem was then approached from the numerical point of view. The process of shot-peening was simulated by a finite element model and the stress distribution was numerically determined and compared to the measured one. The same calculation was applied also to non-shotpeened gears and result compared to test one. A methodology was elaborated to numerically evaluate the fatigue behaviour of the component.