Experimental Study of Tilting-Pad Journal Bearings—Comparison With Theoretical Thermoelastohydrodynamic Results

1992 ◽  
Vol 114 (3) ◽  
pp. 579-587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Fillon ◽  
Jean-Claude Bligoud ◽  
Jean Freˆne

Operating characteristics of four-shoe tilting-pad journal bearings of 100 mm diameter and 70 mm length are determined on an experimental device. The load, between pad configuration, varies from 0 to 10,000 N and the rotational speed is up to 4000 rpm. Forty thermocouples are used in order to measure bearing element temperatures (babbitt, shaft, housing and oil baths). The influence of operating conditions and preload ratio on bearing performances are studied. Comparison between theoretical and experimental results is presented. The theoretical model is also performed on a large tilting-pad journal bearing which was investigated experimentally by other authors.

Author(s):  
Steven Chatterton ◽  
Filippo Cangioli ◽  
Paolo Pennacchi ◽  
Andrea Vania ◽  
Phuoc Vinh Dang

The current design trend of rotating machines like turbo-generators, compressors, turbines, and pumps is focused on obtaining both high dynamic performances and high versatility of machines in different operating conditions. The first target is nowadays achieved by equipping machines with tilting pad journal bearings. For the second target, State-of-the-Art researches are focused on the development of active systems able to adapt the dynamic behavior of the machine to the external environment and new operating conditions. Typical causes of large vibration in rotating machines are faults, residual unbalance, resonance condition and instabilities. Aiming at vibration reduction, in recent years many studies are carried out to investigate different solutions; one of them is based on active tilting pad journal bearing. In this paper, the authors investigate, by simulations, the reduction of shaft vibration by controlling the motion of the pads of a tilting pad journal bearing. The basic idea is to balance the exciting force on the shaft with a suitable resulting force of the oil-film pressure distribution. In particular, a sliding mode controller has been considered and both angular rotation of the pads about the pivot and the radial motion of the pivot have been analyzed. Sliding mode control guarantees high robustness of the control system in real applications that can be characterized by a strong non-linear behavior. In the paper a general consideration about the bearing, the actuating methods and the control system have been provided. A numerical analysis of large size rotor equipped with active pads has been carried out in order to verify the effectiveness of the system in several conditions, even during the most critical operating phase, i.e. the lateral critical speed.


1981 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-141
Author(s):  
M. Malik ◽  
R. Sinhasan ◽  
D. V. Singh

The rolling-pad journal bearing is a kinematic variation of the well-known tilting-pad journal bearing. In rolling-pad bearings, the pads, instead of tilting about fixed pivots, roll at their back surfaces on the inside surface of a common sleeve to accommodate changes in the operating conditions of the bearing. This paper presents a comparison of the theoretical performance characteristics of rolling-pad journal bearings with those of tilting-pad journal bearings. The comparative study indicates that the dynamic performance characteristics of the rolling-pad bearing configuration are superior to those of the tilting-pad bearing.


1998 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Monmousseau ◽  
M. Fillon ◽  
J. Freˆne

Nowadays, tilting-pad journal bearings are used under more and more severely demanding operating conditions. Three limits of safe operation were defined (Leopard, 1976): the hydrodynamic limit, the mechanical limit and the thermal limit. The purpose of this study is to determine the hydrodynamic limit of safe operation during start-up for a tilting-pad journal bearing. During start-up, the rapid increase of the temperature in the bearing solids leads to the thermal expansion of both the pads and the shaft. The operating bearing clearance decreases and, when it tends toward zero, seizure occurs. The evolution of the main characteristics (temperature, pressure, film thickness and displacements) versus time is analyzed in the case when a seizure occurs.


Author(s):  
Thomas Hagemann ◽  
Hubert Schwarze

Flooded lubrication of tilting-pad journal bearings provides safe and robust operation for many applications due to a completely filled gap at the leading edge of each pad. While flooded conditions can be ensured by restrictive seals on the lateral bearing ends for any conventional bearing design, direct lubrication by leading edge grooves (LEG) placed on the pads represents an alternative to produce completely filled gaps at the entrance to the convergent lubricant film. Moreover, this design is flexible to apply different axial sealing baffles in order to influence the thermal equilibrium within the entire bearing. A theoretical model is presented that describes the specific influences of LEG design on the operating characteristics. First, in opposite to conventional tilting-pad journal bearing designs the LEG is a self-contained lube oil pocket which is generally connected to an outer annular oil supply channel. Consequently, each leading edge groove can feature a specific speed and load dependent effective pocket pressure and flow rate. As a consequence of this and the fact that the LEG is part of the pad, it directly influences its tilting angle. Secondly, the thermal inlet mixing model must consider the specific flow conditions depending on the main flow direction within the film as well as the one between outer annular channel and pocket. The novel LEG model is integrated into a comprehensive bearing code validated earlier for other bearing designs. The code is based on an extended Reynolds equation and a three-dimensional energy equation. The entire theoretical model is validated with test data from high performance journal bearing test rig for a four tilting-pad bearing in load between pivot orientation. The bearing is described by the following specifications: 0.5 nominal preload, 60% offset, 70° pad arc angle, 120 mm inner diameter, 72 mm pad length and 1.7 per mille relative bearing clearance. Measurements are conducted for rotational speeds between 4000 and 15000 rpm and specific bearing loads between 0.5 and 2.5 MPa. Within the investigated operating range good agreement between theoretical and experimental data is achieved if all boundary conditions are accurately considered. Additionally, the impact of single simplifications within the model are studied and evaluated. Finally, the test data is compared to results from the same test bearing with modified lubricant oil supply conditions in order to identify specific properties of LEG design. Here, the leading groove edge elements are replaced by conventional spray-bars. It is shown that an assessment of the comparison depends on the definition of reference conditions as the bearings require different oil flow rates for nominal operation due to their design.


Author(s):  
Jason C. Wilkes ◽  
Dara W. Childs

The floating-bearing-test-rig concept was initially developed by Glienicke in 1966 and has since been used to test many tilting-pad journal bearings (TPJBs). The impedances measured during these tests have been compared to rotor/journal perturbed impedance predictions. Since the inertial acceleration of a pad is different for bearing perturbed and rotor perturbed motions, the bearing’s reaction force components for bearing perturbed and journal perturbed motions will also differ. An understanding of how bearing perturbed and rotor perturbed impedances differ is needed to assess the validity of past, present, and future comparisons between TPJB test data and predictions. A new TPJB perturbation model is developed including the effects of angular, radial, and transverse pad motion and changes in pad clearance due to pad bending compliance. Though all of these pad variables have previously been included in different analyses, there are no publications containing perturbations of all four variables. In addition, previous researchers have only perturbed the rotor, while both the bearing and rotor motions are perturbed in the present analysis. The applicability of comparing rotor-perturbed bearing impedance predictions to impedances measured on a bearing-perturbed test rig is assessed by comparing rotor perturbed and bearing perturbed impedance predictions for an example bearing.


Author(s):  
Rafael O. Ruiz ◽  
Sergio E. Diaz

It has been identified that small variations in the pad clearance and preload of a Tilting Pad Journal Bearing lead to important variations in their dynamic coefficients. Although this variation trend is already identified, a more robust statistical analysis is required in order to identify more general tendencies and quantify it. This work presents a framework that helps to identify the relation between the manufacturing tolerance of the bearing (reflected in the pad clearance and preload) and the expected variations on the dynamic coefficients. The procedure underlies the adoption of a surrogate model (based on Kriging interpolation) trained by any deterministic model available to predict dynamic coefficients. The pad clearance and preload are considered uncertain parameters defined by a proper probability density function. All statistical quantities are obtained using stochastic simulation, specifically adopting a Monte Carlo simulation employing the surrogate model. The framework is illustrated through the study of a five pad bearing.


2013 ◽  
Vol 364 ◽  
pp. 71-75
Author(s):  
Ming Hu Yin ◽  
Guo Ding Chen ◽  
Guo Yuan Zhang

Most of the studies about tilting pad journal bearings are for load-on-pad or load-between-pad tilting pad journal bearings, and for the other loading forms, the performance are often estimated by the performance of the two limited conditions, that may reduce the reliablity of bearing design or lead to waste materials in design. To obtained the influence of the load directions on the static and dynamic characteristics of the tilting pad journal bearing, which is called eccentric load effect in this papers, the performance calculation of the tilting pad journal bearing in different load directions is operated with a self-designed program. The results show that the load directions have considerable effects both on the static and dynamic characteristics of the tilting pad journal bearing, for the operating condition that load direction changed rapidly, it need performance analysis of the bearing in its special loading forms to enhance the precision and efficiency of bearing design, espacially where the dynamic performance of the tilting pad journal bearing is demanding.


1983 ◽  
Vol 105 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. L. Adams ◽  
S. Payandeh

A time-transient nonlinear dynamic analysis is presented to study the motion of statically unloaded journal-bearing tilting pads. The major finding is that unloaded pads can exhibit a strong sub-synchronous self-excited vibration. The frequency of this periodic motion is somewhat below half the rotational speed and bears a close relationship to self-excited oil-whip vibration of rotors on lightly loaded non-tilting pad journal bearings. The identification of this type of self-excited pad vibration has practical significance to the solution of problems in applications involving damage to unloaded pads. A comprehensive parametric study is presented and shows which tilting-pad journal bearing parameters are significant to self-excited pad vibration and its elimination.


1993 ◽  
Vol 115 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Dmochowski ◽  
K. Brockwell ◽  
S. DeCamillo ◽  
A. Mikula

In this paper dealing with the tilting pad journal bearing, experimental results are presented which show that, at higher shaft speeds, the leading-edge-groove (LEG) design has significantly lower operating temperatures to those of the conventional design of tilting pad journal bearing. Subsequent theoretical analysis has shown that this reduction in pad operating temperature is the result of feeding cool oil directly to the leading edge of the pad. This has the effect of reducing the amount of hot oil carried over from one pad to the next.


Author(s):  
Alejandro Cerda Varela ◽  
Michel Fillon ◽  
Ilmar Ferreira Santos

The relevance of calculating accurately the oil film temperature build up when modeling tilting-pad journal bearings is well established within the literature on the subject. This work studies the feasibility of using a thermal model for the tilting-pad journal bearing which includes a simplified formulation for inclusion of the heat transfer effects between oil film and pad surface. Such simplified approach becomes necessary when modeling the behavior of tilting-pad journal bearings operating on controllable lubrication regime. Three different simplified heat transfer models are tested, by comparing their results against the ones obtained from an state of the art tilting-pad journal bearing model, where the heat transfer effects are throughly implemented, as well as against some experimental results from the literature. The results obtained show that the validity of the simplified heat transfer models are strongly dependent on the Reynolds number for the oil flow in the bearing. For bearings operating in laminar regime, the decoupling of the oil film energy equation solving procedure, with no heat transfer terms included, with the pad heat conduction problem, where the oil film temperature is applied at the boundary as a Dirichlet condition, showed a good balance between quality of the results, implementation easiness and reduction in calculation time. For bearings on the upper limit of the laminar regime, the calculation of an approximated oil film temperature gradient in the radial direction, as proposed by Knight and Barrett, delivered the best results.


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