Brian Rebbechi, Carl Q. Howard and Colin H. Hansen

Active vibration control was successfully applied to the meshing of gear teeth inside a gearbox to reduce the vibration at the mounting points of a gearbox and the radiated sound pressure level. Magnetostrictive actuators inside the gearbox were used to move the shaft on which the input pinion was mounted, which in turn modifies the kinematic meshing behaviour of the gear teeth.

An adaptive feedforward controller was used to determine the correct amplitude and phase of the force the actuators applied to the shaft to minimize the vibration at the feet of the gearbox housing. The vibration was attenuated by 20-28dB at the 1x, 5-10dB at 2x and 0-2dB at 3x gear mesh frequencies, by simultaneously minimizing the first 3 harmonics of the gear mesh frequency.

Presented at Active99, Florida, USA, pp. 295-304