A novel resonance attractor evaluation method for traveling wave vibration of thin-walled gears: Modeling and experiments

•A novel resonance attractor evaluation method to identify traveling wave vibration.•Showing dynamic features of thin-walled gears in the high-dimensional phase space.•This method can evaluate effects of traveling wave vibrations more comprehensively.•The proposed method is validated by a high-speed transmission experiment. Thin-walled gears have high power density and are the main gear type in aeronautical applications, but threatened by the traveling wave vibration (TWV). In this paper, a novel resonance attractor evaluation (RAE) method is proposed to describe this dynamics characteristic for the complex thin-walled gear drivetrain. The unsteady responses of the drivetrain are discretized into different time-series subsets, and each subset is reconstructed into a high-dimensional mapping phase space based on the average mutual information and the false nearest neighbor theory. Finally, the TWV is identified from the evolution of attractor features—which are quantified by indicators: the boundary radius and the phase point expansion rate. To verify the proposed method, a high-speed transmission experiment involving thin-walled bevel gears is designed, and the RAE model is established based on the proposed methodology and compared with the experimental results. Results show that this model accurately identifies resonance frequencies and describes rotation speed bands that excite the TWV. The proposed methodology provides a theoretical basis for introducing the phase space reconstruction method into the TWV study and for the safe operation of aero-engine gears.