Abstract. The 3K planetary gear system is a basic planetary transmission structure
with many advantages over the 2K-H planetary gear system. However, the
vibration characteristics will be more complicated due to the increase of
central gears meshing with each planet gear simultaneously. In this paper, a
lumped-parameter model for a 3K-II planetary gear set was developed to
simulate the dynamic response. The time-varying stiffness of each meshing
pair for different gear tooth root crack faults is calculated via the finite
element method. By considering the effect of time-varying transmission
paths, the transverse synthetic vibrations are obtained. Subsequently, the
feasibilities of transverse synthetic vibration signals and output torsional
vibration signals as reference for fault diagnosis are analyzed by studying
the time-domain and frequency-domain characteristics of these two vibration
signals. The results indicate that both the transverse synthetic vibration
signals and output torsional vibration signals can be used for fault
identification and localization of the 3K-II planetary gear train, and yet
they both have their limitations. Some results of this paper are available
as references for the fault diagnosis of 3K planetary gear trains.