Simulation of impacts in geartrains using different approaches

Abstract

Gear hammering in diesel engines is a well-known phenomenon in geared drives, exhibiting not only noise but also influencing the performance and durability of diesel engines. Gear hammering is characterised by flanks in contact that lift off and cause impacts when the contact reestablishes, which induces high, sharp dynamic loads. The knowledge of these contact forces is very important for the design of gears. Since contact forces in meshing gears are extremely difficult and expensive to measure, the simulation of these forces plays an important role. Nowadays, these contact simulations are usually carried out within overall models of entire engines using commercial multibody programs that provide submodels for gear contacts, usually based on rigid-body models. However, to reduce inertia effects, gears in geartrains are often designed with very thin bodies, whose elastic compliance influences the contact behaviour to a large extent. For a closer insight into the dynamic behaviour, and especially the influence of thin gear bodies during impact, a typical gear pairing is selected and impacts between one tooth pair are investigated for different boundary and initial conditions with three different models. Besides a multibody model, similar to those used in commercial multibody programs, a fully nonlinear finite-element model and a modally reduced model in combination with a local force law is used. The results of the different approaches are benchmarked in terms of accuracy and numerical effort.