A New Stress Analysis Criteria for Roller Chain Plate

The design and applications of roller chains in engineering problems have been important subject for researchers as well as manufacturers for decades. The suitability of a chain drive, for a given application, does not depend on the chain’s breaking force, but solely on its fatigue strength and resistance to wear. With the chain drives, a purely static load does not exist. When considering the load status of a chain link, load variations take place continuously in all individual phases of a cycle. In this study, theoretically, an optimum design criteria has been developed in order to have uniformly distributed stress which has been less than the allowable stress of the material on chain plate. The stresses have been analyzed due to distributed external load, instead of simple concentrating tension force. Some changes on the shape (classical geometry) have been found for material saving and increasing the strength.