Girth Gear Failures

Published on February 28, 2020

Jörg Albrecht
hevii technologie GmbH
St Gallen, Switzerland
jalbrecht@heviitech.com
www.heviitech.com/mill-bolting/

Damaged Girth Gears represent significant risk to the safe and continuous operation of processing
plants. The failure of just a single gear tooth may result in the immediate total shutdown of a
concentrator, if not an entire facility. To make matters worse, if the condition is severe enough and if a
spare gear isn’t on hand, this unfortunate "business interruption" can extend for months until a
replacement can be manufactured and installed. It’s therefore no wonder that Owners and their
Insurance Providers place so much emphasis on regular NDE inspection of these critical components.
However, they're often not aware that they can be doing something which may prevent many near-
catastrophic failures from happening in the first place...

Girth Gear Inspection Standards

I recently had an interesting discussion with someone who performs girth gear inspections throughout
the globe (not surprisingly, many of his company’s clients are the same as ours). In particular, he and
I had discussed ANSI/AGMA 1010-F14, published by The American Gear Manufacturers Association.
It’s an impressive standard which identifies and describes the classes of common gear failures and
illustrates degree of deterioration. These typical modes of gear failure are grouped into seven general
classes including:
 Wear
Scuffing
Plastic deformation
Hertzian fatigue
Cracking
Fracture
Bending Fatigue

The main body of the document goes into extensive detail about each of these modes. What I had
found quite poignant was Appendix A.2 which, as an apparent mere footnote, deals with
“misalignment”. It states:

“Misalignment is not a failure mode but may be the root cause of many failure modes such as:

Adhesion

Scuffing

Plastic deformation

Hertzian fatigue

Fracture

Bending Fatigue”
It goes on to say: “Misalignment may result in end loading of the teeth, increasing the stresses in that
section of the teeth and thereby increasing the risk of failure.”

Do you notice anything familiar about this second list? It’s almost identical to the first! The take-away
from this is that **proper alignment is absolutely crucial to the reliability of large gear sets. **

Initial Alignment

Whenever Girth Gears are installed, swapped or flipped, great effort and care is taken to align the gear
to the shell within acceptable axial and radial run-outs. Once those tolerances have been attained, the
gear bolts are then fully torqued before the mill can begin operation.

It should be obvious that accurate and adequate fastener tightness is a fundamental requirement to
ensure that the gear remains aligned. Notwithstanding the risk of fatigue failure and slurry ingression,
flange bolts which are too loose enable the gear to slip on the head and move relative to the pinion(s).
It doesn't take much movement but when it happens, conditions become ripe for debilitating failures
to develop.

Bolt Tightness

If the gear flange bolts have been torqued properly to the OEM's specifications using calibrated
equipment, there shouldn't be any concern, right? Wrong…

The Danger of "Torque"

Bolt “torque” is not an effective metric when defining bolt tightness. It’s only an indication of how
much force is applied when trying to turn a nut (or bolt head). The resultant clamp load of this effort is
that which keeps components together. The two are vastly different and rarely linear. In fact, the
relationship between applied torque and residual clamp load is highly dubious at best. When this isn't
fully understood and addressed, affected equipment runs under a dangerous false sense of security
with potentially catastrophic results. To illustrate:
Properly torqued but too loose...

As often happens, hevii was engaged on a new mill installation project to manage the QA of the
bolting procedure during construction. Like countless many other projects in which we’ve been
involved, I was there to make sure that the fastener stress was in accordance to the OEMs designed
bolt load requirements, regardless of the torque variables (we do this by monitoring fastener stress
while tightening, using specialised portable instrumentation). During the torquing of the first bolt I
noticed an abrupt stop in elongation before the target dimension could be confirmed. The millwright
operating the hydraulic wrench on the other side of the gear told me that the pump had ”maxed-out”.
As my first thought was that the nut had galled onto the stud, I asked the contractor’s crew to fully
remove the fastener set. The nut came off without a problem and the threads were undamaged.
However, I noticed that the millwrights had only lubed the bolt threads; they left the surfaces
underneath the washers, head and nut without lube. After instructing them to slather everything with
copious amounts of moly and having reinstalled the bolt in the hole, we began to torque it again. It
wasn’t long before the correct clamp load had been achieved - at well below the pump’s maximum
capacity and hence, at a much lower applied torque.

What’s important to understand is that had we not been there to support the project by monitoring
and controlling the load, the gear would have been assembled dangerously loose even though the
fasteners were torqued to the specified value. It's not a far stretch to say that that many installations
are currently operating under tenuous conditions like this. For some, it may be "good enough". For
others, it's only a matter of time before conventional NDE inspections discover the ugly consequenses
of such problems.

"Out of sight, out of mind"

Even if bolts are properly tightened at assembly, there is always a risk of load loss and load migration
while in service. During annual inspections it’s not uncommon to find that up to 2-3 percent of flange
fasteners have relaxed to be below the OEM’s minimum requirements for reliable operation.
Unfortunately, most facilities are operating in the dark because important fastener preload inspections
and corrective adjustments just aren’t being done. It’s highly ironic that whereas regular annual NDE
inspections are mandated so that latent gear failures can be identified after they occur, annual “Check
and Tune” interventions that can prevent such failures from happening in the first place, usually aren't
even considered. Those charged with the reliable and continuous operation of large mills who don’t
have their fastener preloads verified regularly (by independant competent and qualified resources) may
wish to rethink this approach.