Studies on Neutral Gear Rattle in Early Stage Design

In today's competitive automobile market, customers have become more sensitive towards NVH behavior of the vehicle than ever. The noise generated by gear rattle is one of the main contributors towards customer's overall NVH perception. This paper adopts a model based design approach towards gear rattle phenomenon to predict the tendency of gear rattle at a very early stage of design. This up-front understanding of gear rattle will potentially reduce the expensive design changes and iterations at later stages. A single unloaded gear pair is modeled in AMESim software, which is then extended to the complete gearbox in neutral condition. The sensitivity of rattle index for different input parameters is studied. Analysis on uncertainty propagation is carried out to find the rattle index distribution for Gaussian variation of input parameters. A novel rattle index based on Jerk is proposed and compared with the existing index. Both the indices are later predicted for the complete gearbox and the contribution of each pair towards rattle is analyzed.