Inspection of Tooth Surface Geometry by Means of Vibration Measurement(Assessment of Tooth Surface Undulation from Synchronous Averaged Signal and Application of Frequency Response Function)

Abstract

Tooth surface undulation is one of the important sources of gear noise and vibration. The vibration caused by this source is observed as the occurrence of non-meshing vibration component or ghost noise on a vibration spectrum. Frequently ghost noise occurs at the same frequency with natural frequency of a gear pair, consequently its amplitude is amplified to the considerable level and lead to unexpected and severe noise and vibration problems. In this paper a method for inspecting tooth surface undulation is proposed and applied to a helical gear pair. Vibration characteristics of individual gear are extracted from the vibration signal of a gear by synchronous averaging technique, then a frequency response function that can be determined experimentally is applied to the individual averaged signal to assess the tooth surface undulation. The undulations are evaluated by applying this method to the measured vibration signals of the gear pair operated at various speeds and various torques, and show good agreement with each other regardless of operating conditions and also with the expectation by precise tooth surface measurement, even though the undulation is very small in the level of 0.1µm. These results suggest the ability of this method to assess the tooth surface geometry relevant to vibration.