Experimental and Theoretical Study of Gear Dynamical Transmission Characteristic Considering Measured Manufacturing Errors

Abstract

In the research of gear transmission, the vibration and noise problem has received many concerns all the times. Scholars use tooth modification technique to improve the meshing state of gearings in order to reduce the vibration and noise. However, few of researchers consider the influence of measured manufacturing errors when they do the study of tooth modification. In order to investigate the efficiency of the tooth modification in the actual project, this paper proposes a dynamic model of a helical gear pair including tooth modification and measured manufacturing errors to do a deterministic analysis on the dynamical transmission performance. In this analysis, based on the measured tooth deviation, a real tooth surface (including modification and measured tooth profile error) is fitted by a bicubic B-spline. With the tooth contact analysis (TCA) and loaded tooth contact analysis (LTCA) on the real tooth surface, the loaded transmission error, tooth surface elastic deformation, and load distribution can be determined. Based on the results, the time-varying mesh stiffness and gear mesh impact are computed. Taking the loaded transmission error, measured cumulative pitch error, eccentricity error, time-varying mesh stiffness, and gear mesh impact as the internal excitations, this paper establishes a 12-degree-of-freedom (DOF) dynamic model of a helical gear pair and uses the Fourier series method to solve it. In two situations of low speed and high speed, the gear system dynamic response is analyzed in the time and frequency domains. In addition, an experiment is performed to validate the simulation results. The study shows that the proposed technique is useful and reliable for predicting the dynamic response of a gear system.