Very High Cycle Fatigue Testing of AMS 6308 Steel

Lightweight and reliable gearboxes are required for helicopters and future electrical vertical take-off and landing aircraft. Mechanical gears in these applications experience more than 107 million fatigue cycles over their operating life and between maintenance intervals. Fatigue data for gear steels above 107 cycles is rare due to the testing time required to reach these cycle counts with traditional methods. In this paper, ultrasonic fatigue testing is used to collect mechanical fatigue data on AMS 6308 steel in the 107 to 1010 cycle regime.