Psychoacoustic Analysis of Gear Noise with Gear Faults

Gear drives are widely used in the transmission of many types of vehicles and various gear faults were reported to have different effects on the performance of transmission systems. The psychoacoustics metrics, which are used to represent the human hearing property, are objective indicators of product sound quality performance. Therefore, psychoacoustic analysis of gear noise with gear faults needs to be conducted. In this paper, different types of gear faults are summarized, and two of them, including wear and misalignment, are studied separately in the psychoacoustic analysis of the synthesized noise signal of an example gearbox. The gear noise spectra for the cases with different gear faults are synthesized based on the findings of previous publications, where it shows that the two gear faults can either increase the amplitude at the harmonics of the gear mesh frequency or cause the sideband responses. Five psychoacoustics metrics, including loudness, sharpness, tonality, spectral centroid and Kurtosis, are analyzed for the cases with various gear faults. The analysis results indicate that the psychoacoustic analysis provides more gear faults information, and it can be used in gear health monitoring and troubleshooting. In addition, the psychoacoustic metrics can also be used as design targets in the early stage of the gear design.