Numerical Modelling of Vibration Responses of Helical Gears under Progressive Tooth Wear for Condition Monitoring

Gear wear is a common fault that occurs in a gear transmission system that degrades the operating efficiency and may cause other catastrophic failures such as tooth breakage and fatigue. The progressive wear of a helical gear and its influences on vibration responses are rarely investigated due to the combined effects of the complicated lubrication state and the time-varying characteristic. To fill this gap, a numerical study was put forward to investigate the interactions between gear wear and dynamic response. In this study, an Archard’s wear model with elastohydradynamic lubrication (EHL) effect is adopted to simulate the helical gear wear, which is incorporated with an eight-degree of freedom dynamic model for understanding the gear dynamic at different wear degrees. The wear model shows that the gear wear mainly happens at the gear root due to the relative high slide-to-roll ratio. The dynamic modelling results demonstrate that the wear causes a reduction in time-varying gear mesh stiffness further leads to more vibration. Besides, the simulated vibration responses and experimental validation show that the wear cause increases in the amplitudes of the gear mesh frequency and its harmonics, which can reflect the evolution of progressive gear wear and can be used as monitoring features of gear wear.