Reduction of Vibration in Spur Gears by an Asymmetric Tooth Profile With High Contact Ratio

Abstract

Gear drive is a mechanism transmitting a power and a motion through the teeth contact. The number of teeth in contact changes during a mesh cycle. That raises a discontinuity of the mesh stiffness, and causes a gear vibration. The discontinuity implies a direct relationship with the contact ratio of the gear pair. In general, the high contact ratio more than two decreases the discontinuity of the mesh stiffness. Therefore, the increase of the contact ratio is able to reduce the vibration and the noise in the gear drives. An adoption of a helical gear pair is a method to obtain two or more contact ratio. However, that provides a thrust force and a difficulty to machine and assemble. For a spur gear pair, though it is possible to increase the contact ratio by stretching the tooth depth, the tooth thickness may reduce or be excessively sharp at the tooth tip on the addendum circle. In this study, we designed and made a high contact ratio spur gear pair with an asymmetric tooth profile. The gear pair has a large tooth depth to increase the contact ratio, and the asymmetric tooth profile to prevent the sharpness of tooth at the tip circle. In the running test, the vibration and the noise were measured. Consequently, we succeeded in a reduction of vibration and noise in spur gear drives with the asymmetric tooth profile.