Abstract
The aim of this work is to investigate the characteristics of sidebands of gear mesh vibration. Because the sidebands of mesh harmonics occur owing to pitch error and gear eccentricity, they are synchronous with the rotation of the gear shaft. The dynamic relations between the sidebands and the gear errors are represented by the single-degree-of-freedom vibration model. Analytical result and experimental result show that the amplitude of the sideband rises to local maximum value when the mesh frequency equal to the natural frequency of the gear pair. This sideband characteristic is due to nonlinearity of the gear vibration, and different from that of the mesh harmonics.
