An efficient way to calculate contact pattern movement coefficients

Abstract

Planetary gearboxes are often used for their efficiency and high torque density. In large-scale wind turbine gearboxes with a rotating planet carrier, an effect called contact pattern movement was discovered where the contact pattern moves in the width direction of the mesh while the carrier rotates. A coefficient to evaluate this behavior was previously defined but its calculation requires a lot of computation time and accurate measurements can potentially be very expensive. Therefore in this publication an approach is developed to calculate an approximate contact pattern coefficient from a limited amount of data.