Paper detail

Variability of Critical Rotational Speeds of Gearbox by Misalignement and Manufacturing Errors

Noise measurement on a population of gearbox manufactured in large number often reveals high variability due to tolerances on each gear design parameter (manufacturing errors). Gearbox noise results mainly from housing vibration induced by the gear meshing process. High acoustic levels correspond to excitation in a resonant manner of some critical modes. All gearbox modes and especially these critical modes depend on tolerances related to gear design parameters through the meshing stiffness. Tolerances are considered on shaft misalignment errors, teeth profile errors and teeth longitudinal errors. We introduce these tolerances as geometric random gaussian parameters. The critical modes are extracted using an efficient procedure. The retained "statistical" method to treat tolerances is the Taguchi's method. We illustrate this methodology considering two different gearbox dynamic models fitted out with a single spur gear. Obtained dispersion results are validated by comparison with Monte-Carlo simulations.