Gear Heat Treatment Selection with a Duty Test Matrix

Heat treatment decisions for gears are often reduced to a surface hardness number. That shortcut can work for mild duty, but it frequently breaks down when contact fatigue, scuffing risk, shock events, distortion limits, or finishing constraints become dominant. Many late-stage issues trace back to the same pattern: the duty case is incompletely defined, the process window is underestimated, or verification confirms “a number” without proving the full property profile.