Planetary Gearbox Dynamic Modeling Considering Bearing Clearance and Sun Gear Tooth Crack

Planetary gearbox systems are critical mechanical components in heavy machinery such as wind turbines. They may suffer from various failure modes, due to the harsh working environment. Dynamic modeling is a useful method to support early fault detection for enhancing reliability and reducing maintenance costs. However, reported studies have not considered the sun gear tooth crack and bearing clearance simultaneously to analyze their combined effect on vibration characteristics of planetary gearboxes. In this paper, a dynamic model is developed for planetary gearboxes considering the clearance of planet gear, sun gear, and carrier bearings, as well as sun gear tooth crack levels. Bearing forces are calculated considering bearing clearance, and the dynamic model equations are updated accordingly. The results reveal that the combination of bearing clearances can affect the vibration response with sun gear tooth crack by increasing the kurtosis. It is found that the effect of planet gear bearing clearance is very small, while the sun gear and carrier bearing clearance has clear impact on the vibration responses. These findings suggest that the incorporation of bearing clearance is important for planetary gearbox dynamic modeling.