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Home > BLOG > Gears made from PEEK plastic, already used by Big Ben – see what the advantages are?

Gears made from PEEK plastic, already used by Big Ben – see what the advantages are?

October 18,2022

Perhaps it is now your favourite car – a handsome, elegant, quiet and, more importantly, Mercedes-Benz with Evonik VESTAKEEP® PEEK in the powertrain.

Plastic gears made from VESTAKEEP® PEEK are used for the first time in the powertrain of Mercedes-Benz vehicles, replacing the metal gears previously used.

Sounds a bit unsettling?

How can plastics shake up metal in the automotive industry, where precision manufacturing is required?

Gears in cars are exposed to very demanding working conditions, especially those used in lubricated media such as engine oil, and they need to have adequate mechanical and chemical properties.

Evonik VESTAKEEP® PEEK “happens” to meet these requirements. As a “hexagonal warrior” in the field of special engineering materials, it offers high strength, wear resistance, fatigue resistance, chemical resistance, high temperature resistance and easy processing.

Thanks to these properties, PEEK is particularly suitable for the manufacture of long-lasting gear components.

Slide to see more of the possibilities that VESTAKEEP® PEEK offers for improving gear performance.

The use of PEEK for the production of gears, using an injection moulding process, significantly reduces the many post-processing stages required for the manufacture of metal gears. In other words, it also effectively reduces overall costs.

Compared to other engineering plastics, PEEK has the advantage of high load transmission at high temperatures, with superior mechanical properties, heat and chemical resistance, which can significantly increase the load limit of the component.

PEEK has low water absorption and post-shrinkage, and the dimensional stability of injection moulded parts is excellent.

In short, let go of the stereotype of “plastic” and rest assured that VESTAKEEP® PEEK will do the job.

And the end driver continues to enjoy the benefits of PEEK: it improves transmission efficiency and reduces wear and tear during driving, resulting in fuel savings. Driving and saving fuel at the same time – sounds good to me.

What’s more, it also comes with a ‘low noise’ benefit.

 It has been calculated that by replacing steel teeth with PEEK gears in a grease-lubricated analogue transmission unit, system noise can be reduced by more than 10 dB, mainly due to its energy-absorbing and vibration-damping effect.

From automotive engineering to robotics and drones, plastic gears have a wide range of applications, and VESTAKEEP® PEEK extends the range of applications for plastic gears in transmission systems, allowing them to be adapted to higher torques, speeds and temperatures, with the potential to create smaller, lighter and more energy-efficient gear sets.

These advantageous properties could facilitate the use of PEEK gears in automotive applications, accelerating the replacement of metal parts. Furthermore, PEEK, which is already suitable for 3D printing technology, may be able to go even further and continue to demonstrate its advantages in automotive 3D printing technology.

With such a wide range of applications for VESTAKEEP® PEEK, could we all be driving ‘plastic-printed cars’ in the future?