Abstract
In recent years, a rotating machinery are required to operate at high rotational speed for high efficiency. However, the rotating machinery may become unstable due to the increase of rotational speed. One cause of unstable vibration is the Morton Effect generated in a journal bearing. To avoid unstable vibration due to the Morton Effect, construction of a mathematical model for predicting it becomes an important subject. Many researches on the Morton Effect have been conducted previously. Conventional researches are mostly divided into two types. The first one is a study based on detailed numerical simulation using computational fluid dynamics (CFD), thermoshydrodynamics (THD) and so on. It tries to find solution of a differential equation which indicates the Morton Effect induced vibration for a specific machine or a test rig. Therefore, this approach has led not comprehensive model. The other one is a study expressed by a simple mathematical formula. However, modeling in the time domain has been mainly focused and modeling in the frequency domain has not been investigated in detail. In this research, a model based on the frequency response that can quantitatively evaluate the Morton Effect induced vibration in the rotating machinery supported by the journal bearing is developed. First, experimental data was collected for modeling by using an experimental rig. Using these experimental data of journal position in the journal bearing and temperature of journal, a model of the Morton Effect was constructed based on frequency responses. In the proposed method, the characteristic of the journal bearing was considered as a proportional differential controller from control engineering point of view. In addition, the proposed model considers the Morton Effect induced vibration as a new bending mode of a rotating shaft caused by thermal difference. Then, the developed model of the Morton Effect was evaluated in the frequency domain. The characteristics of vibration calculated by the proposed model indicated good correlation with that of the experimental data. Finally, the behavior of the rotating shaft at another rotational speed was predicted by using the proposed model. It was confirmed that the experimental data well agreed with the predicted results. These results show the usefulness of the proposed method of this research for predicting the Morton Effect.