Simulation of spur gear pair with faults using FEA

A shock vibration is produced due to the sudden change of meshing stiffness of gears when some faults happen to the gears. The fault signals of the gears are always covered by the noises existing in the surroundings, especially under the strong noise background, which makes it difficult to extract the feature signals of fault accurately. In the field testing, to calculate the meshing stiffness and its change precisely is impossible. So the relationship between the vibration and the meshing stiffness is hard to obtain. In order to solve this problem, the method of finite element analysis (FEA) is utilized in this paper to simulate the vibration of a spur gear pair with local fault and calculate the change of meshing stiffness. As a result, the relationships between the vibration of gears and the meshing stiffness are obtained.