Gear Whine Resolution by Tooth Modification and Multi-Body Dynamics Analysis

Gear whine noise impacts customer perception of vehicle interior quietness in general and sound quality in particular. It has been a frequently occurred annoying phenomenon during vehicle development and much discussed topic regarding transmission NVH refinement in automotive industry. This work pertains to a transmission gear whine issue encountered in prototype evaluations during a vehicle program development process. The effort centers itself on the optimization of transmission gear macroscopic and microscopic parameters to fix the issue which is deemed unacceptable for customers. Specifically, by using multi-body dynamics approach, this work carries out a transmission system whine noise simulation based on optimal gear macro parameter selection and micro tooth flank modification. The obtained results show that the proposed design changes could successfully resolve the issue, which is verified by subsequent test measurement and confirmed by subjective evaluations. The work demonstrates that the containment of gear transmission error is an effective countermeasure to resolve the transmission gear whine noise issue.