Multi-channel active gear pair vibration control with an electronically commutated motor as actuator

Due to the growing importance of electro mobility, the requirements in terms of noise and vibration harshness for drive trains with gearboxes driven by electronically commutated motors are continually increasing. A dominant component of the airborne sound emitted by such drive trains is the gear meshing sound originating from dynamic transmission errors. These nondesirable dynamic transmission errors show frequency components at gear mesh frequency as well as in its harmonics. In application these harmonics cause non-desirable high frequency components in the airborne sound. This paper presents a multi-channel adaptive feed-forward controller that is based on the LMS algorithm where the controller uses the electronically commutated motor as actuator. The dynamic behavior has been studied in simulation with a permanent-magnet synchronous motor and a two-degree-of-freedom gear pair model with an angle-dependent spring stiffness, a viscous damper and a transmission error excitation. Results showed that the controller is able to decrease the dynamic transmission error at gear mesh frequency and three additional harmonics simultaneously. Within the scope of this work, experiments have been carried out on a hardware-in-the-loop test bench including a permanent magnet synchronous motor with two gear stages and a magnetic particle break as load. Measurements show a housing vibration reduction of 31 dB and an airborne sound reduction of 13 dB at first gear mesh frequency. At second gear mesh frequency the controller reduces the structure borne sound by 18 dB and airborne sound by 15 dB.