An Experimental Study of the Dynamic Response of Spur Gears Having Tooth Index Errors

While there are numerous theoretical and experimental investigations of dynamic behavior of gear pairs of higher quality grades, very little is known about the same when certain classes of manufacturing errors are present. This study aims at investigating the effects of tooth index errors, one of the most common types of manufacturing errors. Using the changes in stresses along the tooth root regions as the metric, an experimental study is executed here to (i) establish a baseline dynamic behavior under no tangible index error and (ii) characterize the changes caused by tightly-controlled intentional index errors to this baseline dynamic behavior. For this, various gears having different forms of index errors are paired with an instrumented gear having no such errors. For each gear pair, tests are performed within wide ranges of torque and speed. A data processing scheme is proposed to normalize the measured stress signals to multiplication factor. It is shown that the baseline dynamic response represented solely by the dynamic stress factor is altered significantly by transient vibrations induced by the indexing errors, in some cases fully altering the baseline dynamic behavior and increasing the stress multiplication factors significantly. The experimental database formed in this study is expected to guide much needed theoretical studies on this topic.