Actively lubricated bearings applied as calibrated shakers to aid parameter identification in rotordynamics

The servo valve input signal and the radial injection pressure are the two main parameters responsible for dynamically modifying the journal oil film pressure and generating active fluid film forces in controllable fluid film bearings. Such fluid film forces, resulting from a strong coupling between hydrodynamic, hydrostatic and controllable lubrication regimes, can be used either to control or to excite rotor lateral vibrations. An accurate characterization of the active oil film forces is of fundamental importance to elucidate the feasibility of applying the active lubrication as non-invasive perturbation forces, or in other words, as a "calibrated shaker", to perform in-situ rotordynamic tests. The main original contributions of this paper are three: a) the experimental characterization of the active fluid film forces generated in an actively-lubricated tilting-pad journal bearing in the frequency domain and the application of such a controllable bearing as a calibrated shaker aiming at determining the frequency response function (FRF) of rotordynamic systems; b) experimental quantification of the influence of the supply pressure and servo valve input signal on the FRF of rotor-journal bearing systems; c) experimental indication of how small such active fluid film forces (perturbation forces) should be, in order to perturb the rotor-journal bearing system without significantly changing its dynamic characteristics. To validate the experimental procedure and results obtained via actively-lubricated bearing, similar experimental tests are carried out using an electromagnetic shaker. Very good agreements between the two exper- imental approaches are found. Maximum values of the main input parameters, namely servo valve voltage and radial injection pressure, are experimentally identified/suggested with the objective of obtaining non-invasive perturbation forces. Copyright © 2013 by ASME.