Assessing the impact of manufacturing uncertainties on the static and dynamic response of spur gear pairs

The present research activity aims to bridge the gap between gear geometry tolerances, eventual test rig uncertainties, and the resulting gear excitations represented by the static transmission error (STE) as the main source of whining noise. This article offers a detailed experimental investigation addressing the impact of manufacturing errors in the form of lead slope and profile slope errors. One of the major contributions of this article is related to the number of carried measurements, including six spur gear pair configurations. While most literature focuses on gear defects related to wear, cracks, or pitting, this study emphasizes the need to consider gear micro geometry tolerances to minimize vibroacoustic response at the source. The experiments under static conditions are conducted for various operating conditions and compared with numerical computational schemes. Latin Hypercube sampling is selected to compute the peak-to-peak static transmission error bounds. Results yield reliable prediction of the gear STE response even in the presence of deviations. The manufacturing errors cause different trends of STE response, with up to 8 μm difference at low torque. The robustness of the predictive numerical tool is validated, which enables further confident parametric studies. Finally, the dynamic behavior is investigated. Important differences are detected for gears having the same macro geometry and different manufacturing errors. The meshing excitations resulting from gear uncertainties lead to notable fluctuations in the dynamic responses.