Abstract
Bearings and other revolute pairs in gear drives will form clearances due to wear after working for a long time, which will aggravate the vibration and noise of the gear. Therefore, taking the gear drives with revolute pair clearance as the research object, the calculation formulas of the backlash and contact ratio is derived, and the time-varying mesh stiffness model considering the clearance is presented in this work. Then, a nonlinear dynamic model for the gear drives with revolute pair clearance is proposed by combining the backlash, contact ratio and the time-varying mesh stiffness. The effects of the clearance on the meshing stiffness, load sharing factor and nonlinear behavior are investigated. Results indicate that the revolute pair clearance weakens the meshing stiffness and increases working hours in single teeth contact area, thereby increasing the risk of premature failure of the gear drive. In addition, the revolute pair clearance has negligible effect on the nonlinear behavior of gear pair in low-speed running, but it can obviously change the bifurcation behavior and aggravate the vibration of the gear drive.