The importance of plastic gears for modern industry is growing every year. The engineer sizing plastic gears
has a very difficult task. There is no international standard available for the strength analysis. The only method
publicly accepted is the German guideline VDI2545. In addition to a lack of calculation methods there is a need
for measuring material properties.
This paper shall give an overview over the current situation and will provide some guidelines how to rate
plastic gears, how to handle the lack of material data available and how to conduct measurements of material
properties to make them suitable for the available calculation methods.