Transmission DynamicsModelling : Gear Whine Simulation Using AVL Excite

Abstract: Nowadays, increasing pressure from legislation and customer demands in the automotive industry are 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 internal combustion engines (ICE). The noise from an electric vehicle comes mainly from contact between tyres 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 estimate the 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 main intrusive concern is known as gear whine noise. Gear whine noise is an undesired vibroacoustic phenomenon 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 and structure-borne noise. The gear whine noise originates primarily from the excitation coming from transmission 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 in an electric powertrain line developed by AVL Vicura. The electric transmission used in this study provides 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. In order to perform NVH analysis under different operating conditions, a multibody dynamics model according 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 all excitation frequencies are properly observed in FFT plots. Nevertheless, when it comes to the second 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 of the AVL Excite model. Another investigation is a numerical design study to analyses how the damping coefficients influence the response. After reducing the damping parameters, the results show that the housing and 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.