Effect of wear on the dynamic characteristics of a rigid rotor supported by journal bearings

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to examine the effects of wear severity on the static and dynamic characteristics of journal bearings, and on the vibration response of a rigid rotor supported by journal bearings. Numerical simulations using MATLAB was conducted for three different operating regimes, namely low loaded operating regime ($$\epsilon _0 = 0.15$$ ϵ 0 = 0.15 ), moderately loaded operating regime ($$\epsilon _0 = 0.45$$ ϵ 0 = 0.45 ) and highly loaded operating regime ($$\epsilon _0 = 0.75$$ ϵ 0 = 0.75 ) with wear depth parameter ratio ($$\delta$$ δ ) varied from 0 to 0.5 at increments of 0.1. Numerical results showed that the vibration response of the rotor generally increases with the increase of the wear depth for all cases of low, moderately and highly loaded operating regimes of the bearings. For the values of parameters considered in this work, it was shown that the vibration response amplitude of the rotor in worn journal bearings may be six times larger compared to the response amplitude of the rotor in non-worn bearings.