Inherent in the construction of many experimental apparatus designed to measure the hydro/aerodynamic forces of rotating machinery are features that contribute undesirable parasitic forces to the measured or test forces. Typically, these parasitic forces are due to seals, drive couplings, and hydraulic and/or inertial unbalance. To obtain accurate and sensitive measurement of the hydro/aerodynamic forces in these situations, it is necessary to subtract the parasitic forces from the test forces. In general, both the test forces and the parasitic forces will be dependent on the system operating conditions including the specific motion of the rotor. Therefore, to properly remove the parasitic forces the vibration orbits and operating conditions must be the same in tests for determining the hydro/aerodynamic forces and tests for determining the parasitic forces. This, in turn, necessitates a means by which the test rotor’s motion can be accurately controlled to an arbitrarily defined trajectory. Here in, an interrupt-driven multiple harmonic open-loop controller was developed and implemented on a laboratory centrifugal pump rotor supported in magnetic bearings (active load cells) for this purpose. This allowed the simultaneous control of subharmonic, synchronous, and superharmonic rotor vibration frequencies with each frequency independently forced to some user defined orbital path. The open-loop controller was implemented on a standard PC using commercially available analog input and output cards. All analog input and output functions, transformation of the position signals from the time domain to the frequency domain, and transformation of the open-loop control signals from the frequency domain to the time domain were performed in an interrupt service routine. Rotor vibration was attenuated to the noise floor, vibration amplitude ≈0.2 μm, or forced to a user specified orbital trajectory. Between the whirl frequencies of 14 and 2 times running speed, the orbit semi-major and semi-minor axis magnitudes were controlled to within 0.5% of the requested axis magnitudes. The ellipse angles and amplitude phase angles of the imposed orbits were within 0.3 deg and 1.0 deg, respectively, of their requested counterparts.
