Improved analytical calculation model of spur gear mesh excitations with tooth profile deviations

Time-varying mesh stiffness and gear transmission errors are the major excitations to gear dynamics system. How to calculate them more accurately and efficiently has attracted much attention worldwide for a long period. Especially consideration of the gear body structure coupling effect and the tooth profile error will make interactions between the tooth pairs in mesh more complicated so that traditional analytical methods could not applicable any more. In this paper, a comprehensive and general analytical gear mesh model is proposed by considering all the deformations including the teeth deformation, teeth contact deformation, fillet-foundation deformation, and gear body structure coupling effect, as well as tooth profile deviations. The calculation formulas for the mesh stiffness, load sharing ratio and static transmission error are derived, and the corresponding efficient solving method is also proposed. Based on the proposed model, the influencing mechanism of the gear body structure coupling effect on the total mesh stiffness is revealed. The proposed mesh stiffness calculation model is proven to be more general and comprehensive since the traditional analytical models are the special cases of the proposed model. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.