Measurement of gear noise behaviour for different microgeometries

Designing machines under consideration of noise emission is more than a convenience aspect. For many applications, it is rather a major design goal. This is especially true for gear meshes, which are an important source of vibration in the transmissions. There are many publications available concerning theoretical aspects of design of micro geometry of gears for vibration reduction. However, an experimental validation and sound comparisons among different theoretical designs can be rarely found. Therefore, some basic gear micro geometry designs have been carried out for noise reduction. Special attention has been paid in order to preserve the identical main geometry. This provides an excellent basis for a valid comparison of the influences of a theoretically silent design versus standard design. Since spur gears exhibit an inauspicious noise behaviour, measurements have been conducted on this gear type with unmodified micro geometry 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.