Random Vibration and Dynamic Analysis of a Planetary Gear Train in a Wind Turbine

Premature failure of gearboxes is a big challenge facing the wind power industry. It highly depends on fully understanding the embedded dynamics to solve this problem. To this end, this paper investigates the random vibration and dynamics of planetary gear trains (PGTs) in wind turbines under the excitation of wind turbulence. The turbulence is represented by the Von Karmon spectrum and implemented by passing white noise through a 2nd-order shaping filter. Then, extra equations are formed and added to the original governing equations of motion. With this augmented equation set, a recursive numerical algorithm based on stochastic Newmark scheme is applied to solve for the statistics of the responses starting from initial conditions. After simulation, the variances of the vibration responses and the dynamic meshing forces at gear meshes are obtained.