Abstract
A method for performing transient dynamic analysis of multi-shaft rotor system is proposed. The proposed methodology uses the reported Successive Merge and Condensation (SMAC) method [12] and a decoupling technique to decouple the shafts. Multi-shaft rotor systems are treated as systems of many independent single shaft rotor systems with external unknown coupling forces acting at the points of couplings. For each time step, first, the SMAC method is used to get the transient response in terms of the unknown coupling forces. This is followed by the application of the coupling constraints to calculate the coupling forces and, in turn, the response at the end of that time step. The proposed method preserves the efficiency advantages of the SMAC algorithm for single-shaft rotor system. Numerical examples to validate and illustrate the applicability of the method are given. The method is shown to be applicable to linear and non-linear coupling problems.