The effect of a cracked tooth on the dynamic response of a simple gearbox with a flexible coupling under acyclism operation

In this paper, the effect of a cracked tooth on the dynamic response of a simple gearbox with a flexible coupling is studied. The gearbox is driven by a combustion engine through a flexible coupling for which Nelson and Crandall’s model is used. The acyclism regime is generated by diesel engine inducing fluctuations of speed, torque and meshing stiffness. In addition, the cracked tooth of the wheel gear is modelled by lowering the meshing stiffness. After solving the equations of motion by using the Newmark method, the time response, spectrum, joint time-frequency analysis and envelope spectrum are used to characterize the dynamic response of the defected gearbox where the cracked tooth frequency is irregular and independent of the acyclism frequency