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The earliest example of a gear train dates to at least 2,000 B.C. when Chinese engineers built a chariot that used a complex planetary mechanism made of wooden gears to let a dragon head continuously point south when driven around (Ref. 1). In Greece, a surprisingly advanced Antikythera gearbox mechanism, incorporating at least 37 precisely crafted bronze gears, was built years later, between 205–60 B.C. (Ref. 2).
In planetary gear systems of high power density and high gear ratio, helical gears create undesirable tilting moments on the planet gears; therefore, spur gears are still preferred for planetary gears -- a special challenge with respect to noise. Specifically, the different behavior of planetary gears with sequential and symmetric gear mesh is explained in this paper.