Impact of Rotor-Stator Rub-Impact on Post-Resonance Backward Whirl Excitation

Abstract

It has been indicated in the literature to many factors that contribute to faults in rotor dynamical systems such as rubbing impact at stator-rotor contact. Accordingly, the appearance of rubbing impact is investigated here as one of the major factors that could excite the post-resonance backward whirl (Po-BW) phenomena in rotors. Therefore, the effect of rotor-stator rub impact on Po-BW excitation is numerically studied here with a Jeffcott rotor model. Accordingly, vertical and horizontal rotor configurations are considered here with rub-impact. The rubbing between the stator and the rotor is modeled by using both Heaviside function and the exact time calculation during the numerical simulation for comparison and to guarantee whirl results convergence. It is found that at a time step of order 10−6 in the numerical integration both Heaviside function and exact contact time calculations produce similar convergent results. In addition, the obtained numerical simulation results show that the stator-rotor rub-impact is found to excite the Po-BW and affects their recurrence and intensity. Accordingly, the current study provides a more insight to the impact of rotor-stator rubbing on Po-BW excitation. Therefore, the rotor-stator rub-impact is found to be one of the main factors that lead to excite the Po-BW during the rotor transient operation.