Dynamic features of planetary gear train with tooth errors

Abstract

As one of the inherited displacement excitation sources which are related to the gear vibration and noise problems, gear transmission error always consists of two parts: gear tooth geometric error and tooth elastic deformation under transmitted load. The gear tooth geometric errors were directly employed as the displacement excitations in previous papers, which are not accurate. In this paper, a new method is developed to transform the gear tooth errors (TEs) to be the appropriate dynamic excitations through the mesh stiffness and the unloaded static transmission error (USTE), where the obtained displacement excitation curves, namely the USTE curves, are very different from the TE curves. Incorporation of the proposed model into the dynamic model of a planetary gear train enables the investigation of the TE effect on the dynamic excitations and vibrations. Two groups of TEs with different amplitudes are employed in the case studies. The results verify that the micro-scale TEs influence not only the dynamic displacement excitation, but also the total mesh stiffness and the planetary gear vibrations greatly.