For complex marine gearbox, an optimum design method for determining the area of additional damping material quickly and accurately is established to realize low noise design of gearbox. Firstly, the single-stage herringbone gearbox is taken as the research object, and the finite element/boundary element method is used to establish the radiated noise calculation model of the gearbox. Then the panel surface is divided by acoustic transfer vector analysis (ATV) and modal contribution analysis (MAC), and the preliminary panel screening is completed. Finally, through further screening of the panel contribution analysis, the panel which contributes most to the sound pressure of the field point is obtained as an effective additional position of the damping material, and the radiated noise is further calculated and analyzed. The results show that this method can quickly and accurately determine the effective additional area of the damping material, which reduces the sound pressure of the optimized field points by 5.93 dB and 6.03 dB, respectively, and achieves good noise reduction effect.
