Rotor-bearing system characteristics, such as natural frequencies, mode shapes, stiffness and damping coefficients, are essential to diagnose and correct vibration problems during system operation. Of the above characteristics, accurate identification of bearing force parameters, i.e. stiffness and damping coefficients, is one of the most difficult to achieve. Field identification by imbalance response measurements is a simple and often reliable way to determine synchronous speed force coefficients. An enhanced method to estimate bearing support force coefficients in flexible rotor-bearing systems is detailed. The estimation is carried out from measurements obtained near bearing locations from two linearly independent imbalance tests. An earlier approach assumed rotordynamic measurements at the bearing locations, which is very difficult to realize in practice. The enhanced method relaxes this constraint and develops the procedure to estimate bearing coefficients from measurements near the bearing locations. An application of the method is presented for a test rotor mounted on two-lobe hydrodynamic bearings. Imbalance response measurements for various imbalance magnitudes are obtained near bearing locations and also at rotor mid-span. At shaft speeds around the bending critical speed, the displacements at the rotor mid-span are an order of magnitude larger than the shaft displacements at the bearing locations. The enhanced identification procedure renders satisfactory force coefficients in the rotational speed range between 1,000 rpm and 4,000 rpm. The amount of imbalance mass needed to conduct the tests and to obtain reliable shaft displacement measurements influences slightly the magnitude of the identified force coefficients. The effect of increasing the number of rotor sub-elements in the finite-element modeling of the shaft is noted. Sensitivity of the method and derived parameters to noise in the measurements is also quantified.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-228). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-97).

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 73 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-73).

This thesis provides experimental frequency dependent stiffness and damping coefficient results for a high-speed, lightly loaded, flexible-pivot tilting-pad bearing, with a load-on-pad configuration. Test conditions include four shaft speeds (6000, 9000, 13000 and 16000 rpm), and bearing unit loads from 172 kPa to 690 kPa. The results show that the bearing stiffness is a quadratic function of the frequency of vibration; hence their frequency dependency can be modeled by added-mass terms. The additional degrees of freedom introduced by the pads and the influence of the inertial forces generated in the fluid film account for this frequency dependency. The conventional frequency-dependent stiffness and damping model for tilting-pad bearings is extended with an added-mass matrix to account for the frequency dependency. This approach allows the description of the bearing dynamic characteristics with frequency-independent stiffness, damping and added-mass matrices. Experimental results are compared with predictions from the Reynolds equation and from a bulk-flow Navier-Stokes model. Both models produce good predictions of the stiffness and damping coefficients. However, results show that the bulk-flow model is more adequate for predicting the direct added-mass terms because it accounts for the fluid inertial forces. A bulk-flow solution of the Navier-Stokes equations that includes the effects of fluid inertia should be used to calculate the rotordynamic coefficients of a flexible-pivot tilting-bearing. Static performance measurement results are also detailed. Results include pad metal temperatures, eccentricity-ratios and attitude-angle as a function of bearing load, and estimated power losses.

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