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Gear drives are widely used in the transmission of many types of vehicles and various gear faults were reported to have different effects on the performance of transmission systems. The psychoacoustics metrics, which are used to represent the human hearing property, are objective indicators of product sound quality performance. Therefore, psychoacoustic analysis of gear noise with gear faults needs to be conducted. In this paper, different types of gear faults are summarized, and two of them, including wear and misalignment, are studied separately in the psychoacoustic analysis of the synthesized noise signal of an example gearbox. The gear noise spectra for the cases with different gear faults are synthesized based on the findings of previous publications, where it shows that the two gear faults can either increase the amplitude at the harmonics of the gear mesh frequency or cause the sideband responses.

In-vehicle noise is composed of a variety of tonal (frequency-related) components and the tonal components play an important role in the improvement of interior vehicle sound quality. Much research has been focused on the suppression of sound pressure level and achieved certain positive effects. However, in some operating conditions, customers still perceive the tonal components and complain about the vehicle quality even the sound pressure level is relatively low. Therefore, a better understanding of how tonal components are perceived is necessary for automotive designers. To do so, psychoacoustics results about human hearing mechanism to tonal components are comprehensively summed in this study: human hearing response to pure tone, two tones and multiple tones. Then, well-controlled testing stimuli were generated and subjective annoyance testing was conducted. The results show agreement with former researchers' findings.

A combined lumped parameter, finite element (FE) and boundary element (BE) model is developed to predict the whine noise from rear axle. The hypoid geared rotor system, including the gear pair, shafts, bearings, engine and load, is represented by a lumped parameter model, in which the dynamic coupling between the engaging gear pair is represented by a gear mesh model condensed from the loaded tooth contact analysis results. The lumped parameter model gives the dynamic bearing forces, and the noise radiated by the gearbox housing vibration due to the dynamic bearing force excitations is calculated using a coupled FE-BE approach. Based on the predicted noise, a new procedure is proposed to tune basic rear axle design parameters for better sound quality purpose. To illustrate the salient features of the proposed method, the whine noise from an example rear axle is predicted and tuned.