Engineering components made of composite materials find increasing applications ranging from spacecraft to small instruments. Many types of gear pump use composite gears, however little literature is available on their use. In this paper results obtained by static stress analysis of composite gears using a three-dimensional finite element approach are presented. Performance of two orthotropic material gears are presented and compared with mild steel gear. From the results it is concluded that composite material such as graphite/epoxy can be thought of as a material for power transmission gears. © 1993.