Reliability sensitivity analysis of tooth modification on dynamic transmission error of helical planetary gears

As one of the most influential factors leading to gear vibrations, transmission errors of the engaging gears must be controlled to achieve a desirable dynamic performance for a power transmission system. It is well known that tooth modification is an effective way to reduce the fluctuations of the transmission error of a gear pair. The challenge is determining how to establish a quantitative relationship between the tooth modification parameters and the transmission error fluctuations of a gear pair. The present study aims to reveal the sensitivity of the tooth modification parameters on the transmission error fluctuations of a helical planetary gear train in a wind turbine gearbox. For this purpose, a sophisticated parametric three-dimensional contact model that included the micro-geometries of the tooth modification is developed in the ROMAX® environment. Based on this model, a loaded tooth contact analysis is carried out to compute the meshing characteristics, such as the contact pressure and transmission error of each gear pair in the planetary gear train. With the obtained meshing characteristics, the tooth modification amounts of the engaging gears were determined using empirical formulas. These modification amounts are designated as the mean values of the samples generated by the central composite method. After repeating the loaded tooth contact analysis process for each generated sample, a quadratic polynomial function is derived using the response surface method to describe the quantitative relationship between the tooth modification parameters and the dynamic transmission error fluctuations. A large number of random samples are generated using a Monte Carlo method, and the corresponding dynamic transmission error fluctuations are determined with the aforementioned quadratic polynomial function. Based on these samples, a reliability sensitivity analysis is carried out to demonstrate the effects of the tooth modification parameters on the dynamic transmission error fluctuations of the helical planetary gear train.