  Noise measurement on a population of gearbox manufactured in large number
often reveals high variability due to tolerances on each gear design parameter
(manufacturing errors). Gearbox noise results mainly from housing vibration
induced by the gear meshing process. High acoustic levels correspond to
excitation in a resonant manner of some critical modes. All gearbox modes and
especially these critical modes depend on tolerances related to gear design
parameters through the meshing stiffness. Tolerances are considered on shaft
misalignment errors, teeth profile errors and teeth longitudinal errors. We
introduce these tolerances as geometric random gaussian parameters. The
critical modes are extracted using an efficient procedure. The retained
"statistical" method to treat tolerances is the Taguchi's method. We illustrate
this methodology considering two different gearbox dynamic models fitted out
with a single spur gear. Obtained dispersion results are validated by
comparison with Monte-Carlo simulations.
