Influence of Manufacturing Errors on the Behaviour of a Two-stage Planetary Gear Train

Planetary gear train is widely used in large heavy-duty machineries such as helicopters and ships due to its large transmission ratio, strong bearing capacity, and small size. In this paper, and the load sharing ratio (LSR) and overall transmission error (TE) of a two-stage double-helical planetary gear train are studied. Firstly, the static balance equations of the double-helical planetary gear train are established. Then, the LSR under different mesh phasing and the overall TE are obtained by solving the equations. Finally, different errors such as pinhole position and eccentricity error are taken into consideration and the influence of errors on load sharing ratio and transmission error are analyzed. The results show that the excitation frequency of transmission error is related to the number of planet gears and mesh phasing and the LSR is related to the mesh phasing, especially to the sequentially phased transmission. It is also concluded that the excitation frequency of the output element of the two stages can be seen as the superposition of the mesh frequencies of each stage and that the studied errors have a significant impact on the LSR and the TE. Keywords: Double-helical planetary gear; Meshing phase; Load Sharing Ratio, Transmission Error.