Gear Teeth Modification for a 2.5MW Wind Turbine Gearbox

This paper reports a method to modify the gear tooth profile of a wind turbine gearbox to reduce the noise caused by the impact of the gear teeth. The major causes of tooth impact are the elastic deformation of the gear teeth, shafts, and case of the gearbox under loading, and the fabrication tolerances in gear manufacturing. In this study, the tooth profile was modified considering the elastic deformation of the gear tooth and the tooth lead modification to compensate for tooth interference in the lead direction as a result of shaft deformations. The method was applied to the gearbox of a 2.5MW wind turbine, and the transmission error was characterized before and after modifying the gear teeth. For the modified gear teeth, the transmission error (67.6%) was lower by 17.8%. Additionally, the gear contact stress was reduced by 6.3%, to 22.3%.