EFFICIENT MODELLING AND PREDICTION OF MESHING NOISE FROM CHAIN DRIVES

This paper presents a practical approach for predicting the meshing noise due to the impact of chain rollers against the sprocket of chain drives. An acoustical model relating dynamic response of rollers and its induced sound pressure is developed based on the fact that the acoustic field is mainly created by oscillating rigid cylindrical rollers. Finite element techniques and numerical software codes are employed to model and simulate the acceleration response of each chain roller which is necessary for noise level prediction of a chain drive under varying operation conditions and different sprocket configurations. The predicted acoustic pressure levels of meshing noise are compared with the available experimental measurements. It is shown that the predictions are in reasonable agreement with the experiments and the approach enables designers to obtain required information on the noise level of a selected chain drive in a time- and cost-efficient manner.