Effects of different hard finishing processes on gear excitation

Gearboxes are essential in mechanical drive trains for power transmission. A low noise emission and thus an optimized excitation behavior is a substantial design objective for many applications in terms of comfort and operational safety. There exist numerous processes for manufacturing gears, which all show different properties in relation to the process variables and, therefore, differences in the resulting accuracy and quality of the gear flank. In this paper, the influence of three different manufacturing processes for hard finishing—continuous generating grinding, polish grinding and gear skiving—on the surface structure of gear flanks and the excitation behavior is investigated experimentally and analyzed by the application force level. A tactile scanning of the gear flanks determines the flank surface structure and the deviations from the desired geometry. A torsional acceleration measurement during speed ramp-ups at different load levels is used to analyze the excitation of the gears. The results show only a minor influence of the surface structure on the application force level. The excitation behavior is dominated by the influence of the flank modification and its deviation from the design values.