A Development of the High-toughness Nitriding to Reduce Heat Treatment Distortion of AT Annulus Gear

In terms of reducing the gear noise of automatic transmission, improvement of heat treatment distortion of the annulus gear is very important, because annulus gear is very sensitive heat treatment due to thin walled ring-like shape. Nitriding is very effective method to meet the both requirements for heat treatment distortion and durability of the annulus gear, as compared with conventional carburizing. However, conventional nitriding has problems to be applied for annulus gear, such as brittleness of compound layer and low adhesion strength between compound layer and matrix.

In this research, we developed the high toughness nitriding and greatly improved the problems as mentioned above, by controlling gas pressure and temperature.