Abstract
The problem of gear noise, particularly in motor vehicles, has become an important and annoying problem due to the continual reduction in sounds from other noise exciters such as engines and wind noise. In an effort to control gear noise, one must first select the proper design and profile modifications to optimize a design. Once this is done, it typically becomes difficult to economically manufacture the gears with their optimized modifications. One goal is to select designs that have a low sensitivity to manufacturing errors, thus allowing a much lower statistical spread in the noise levels of the transmission. In this paper, we present two procedures for identifying the sensitivity of a gear pair to manufacturing errors such that individual gear designs may be compared to one another in an effort to achieve low manufacturing sensitivity.
