Transmission Dynamics Modelling : Gear Whine Simulation Using AVL Excite

Abstract: Nowadays, increasing pressure from legislation and customer demands in the automotive industryare forcing manufacturers to produce greener vehicles with lower emissions and fuel consumption.As a result, electrified and hybrid vehicles are a growing popular alternative to traditional internalcombustion engines (ICE). The noise from an electric vehicle comes mainly from contact betweentyres and road, wind resistance and driveline. The noise emitted from the driveline is for the mostpart related to the gearbox. When developing a driveline, it is a factor of importance to estimatethe noise radiating from the gearbox to achieve an acceptable design.Gears are used extensively in the driveline of electric vehicles. As the gears are in mesh, a mainintrusive concern is known as gear whine noise. Gear whine noise is an undesired vibroacousticphenomenon and is likely to originate through the gear contacts and be transferred through themechanical components to the housing where the vibrations are converted into airborne andstructure-borne noise. The gear whine noise originates primarily from the excitation coming fromtransmission error (TE). Transmission error is defined as the difference between the ideal smoothtransfer of motion of a gear and what is in practice due to lack of smoothness.The main objective of this study is to simulate the vibrations generated by the gear whine noise inan electric powertrain line developed by AVL Vicura. The electric transmission used in this studyprovides only a fixed overall gear ratio, i.e. 9.59, under all operation conditions. It is assumed thatthe system is excited only by the transmission error and the mesh stiffness of the gear contacts. Inorder to perform NVH analysis under different operating conditions, a multibody dynamics modelaccording to the AVL Excite program has been developed. The dynamic simulations are thencompared with previous experimental measurements provided by AVL Vicura.Two validation criteria have been used to analyse the dynamic behaviour of the AVL Excite model:signal processing using the FFT method and comparison with the experimental measurements.The results from the AVL Excite model show that the FFT criterion is quite successful and allexcitation frequencies are properly observed in FFT plots. Nevertheless, when it comes to thesecond criterion, as long as not all dynamic parameters of the system such as damping or stiffnesscoefficients are provided with certainty in the model, it is too difficult to investigate the accuracy ofthe AVL Excite model.Another investigation is a numerical design study to analyses how the damping coefficientsinfluence the response. After reducing the damping parameters, the results show that the housingand bearings have the highest influence on the response. If more acceptable results are desired,future studies must be concentrated on these to obtain more acceptable damping values.