Measurement of Gear Noise Behaviour for Different Microgeometries

Designing noise emission of technical machines is more than a convenience aspect, for many applications it is a central design goal. This is especially true for the gear meshes, which are an important source of noise in the transmission that transfers the torque and speed in the drive train. Many publications concerning theoretical aspects of the design of adequate micro geometry for gears are available. However, an experimental validation and sound comparison between different theoretical designs is hard to find.Therefore some basic gear micro geometry designs have been tested for noise excitation. Special attention has been paid to use gears of identical main geometry and only different micro geometries. This provides an excellent basis for a valid comparison of the impact of a theoretical silent design versus standard design. Since most theoretical approaches start by analysing a spur gear mesh, measurements have been conducted on spur gears with non-modified microgeometry versus low noise micro geometry. The acceleration measurement results show the advantage of an adequate micro geometry design. As next step the behaviour of further geometries may be evaluated in comparison to the results shown in this paper.