International Journal of Rotating Machinery

The fast preliminary design and safe operation of turbomachines require a simple and accurate prediction of axial thrust. An underestimation of these forces may result in undersized bearings that can easily overload and suffer damage. While large safety margins are used in bearing design to avoid overloading, this leads to costly oversizing. In this study, the accuracy of currently available axial thrust estimation methods is analyzed by comparing them to each other and to theoretical pressure distribution, numerical simulations, and new experimental data. Available methods tend to underestimate the maximum axial thrust and require data that are unavailable during the preliminary design of turbomachines. This paper presents a new, simple axial thrust estimation method that requires only a few preliminary design parameters as the input data and combines the advantages of previously published methods, resulting in a more accurate axial thrust estimation. The method is validated against previously public data from a radial pump and new experimental data from a centrifugal compressor, the latter measured at Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT, Finland, and two gas turbines measured at Aurelia Turbines Oy, Finland. The maximum deviation between the estimated axial thrust using the hybrid method and the measured one is less than 13%, while the other methods deviate by tens of percent.

There are many problems of vibration and noise in combine working. As the main power source and excitation source of a combine, the working state of an engine directly affects the reliability and stability of the whole harvester. In order to analyze the vibration response characteristics of a chassis frame under engine excitation, the vibration mechanism and theoretical excitation characteristics of an engine vibration source on a crawler combine harvester are analyzed in this paper, and the vibration response of chassis under engine excitation is tested and analyzed. After theoretical derivation, a two-degree-of-freedom dynamic model of an engine and chassis is established. The experimental results show that the up and down vibration generated by the engine is the main vibration source in the direction, and the main excitation frequency is the second-order firing frequency. This paper provides a theoretical reference and experimental basis for vibration reduction and noise reduction of combine and vibration characteristics of the chassis frame.

Mechanical failures of a complex machine such as rotor widely used in severe conditions often require specialized knowledge, technical expertise, and imagination to prevent its rupture. In this paper, a model for analyzing excitation of a coupled lateral-torsional vibrations of a shaft system in an inviscid fluid is proposed. The model considers the recurrent contact of the vibrating shaft to a fixed stator. The simplified mathematical model of the rotor-stator system is established based on the energy principle. The dynamic characteristics of the fluid-rotor system are studied, and the features of rub-impact are extracted numerically and validated experimentally under the effects of the unbalance and the hydrodynamic forces. The main contribution of this article is in extraction and identification of the rub features in an inviscid medium which proved to be complex by the obstruction of the fluid and required the use of appropriate signal processing tools. The results through a synchrosqueezing wavelet transform indicated that the exciting fluid force could significantly attenuate the instability and amplitude of rubbing rotor. The experimental results demonstrated that for half the first critical speed, the subharmonic and the irregular orbit patterns provide good indices for rub detection in an inviscid fluid of the rotating shafts. Finally, it is revealed that the instantaneous frequency extraction based on wavelet synchrosqueezing is a useful tool to identify the weak and hidden peak harmonics localised in the time-frequency maps of the fluid-rotor system.

Performance feature extraction is the primary problem in equipment performance degradation assessment. To handle the problem of high-dimensional performance characterization and complexity of calculating the performance indicators in flexible material roll-to-roll processing, this paper proposes a PCA method for extracting the degradation characteristic of roll shaft. Based on the analysis of the performance influencing factors of flexible material roll-to-roll processing roller, a principal component analysis extraction model was constructed. The original feature parameter matrix composed of 10-dimensional feature parameters such as time domain, frequency domain, and time-frequency domain vibration signal of the roll shaft was established; then, we obtained a new feature parameter matrix by normalizing the original feature parameter matrix. The correlation measure between every two parameters in the matrix was used as the eigenvalue to establish the covariance matrix of the performance degradation feature parameters. The Jacobi iteration method was introduced to derive the algorithm for solving eigenvalue and eigenvector of the covariance matrix. Finally, using the eigenvalue cumulative contribution rate as the screening rule, we linearly weighted and fused the eigenvectors and derived the feature principal component matrix of the processing roller vibration signal. Experiments showed that the initially obtained, 10-dimensional features of the processing rollers’ vibration signals, such as average, root mean square, kurtosis index, centroid frequency, root mean square of frequency, standard deviation of frequency, and energy of the intrinsic mode function component, can be expressed by 3-dimensional principal components , and . The vibration signal features reduction dimension was realized, and , and contain 98.9% of the original vibration signal data, further illustrating that the method has high precision in feature parameters’ extraction and the advantage of eliminating the correlation between feature parameters and reducing the workload selecting feature parameters.

With the development of high-speed crafts, new propulsion systems are introduced into the marine industry. One of the new propulsion systems is linear jet which is similar to pump jet and has a rotor, a stator, and a duct. The main difference between this system and pump jet is the placement of linear jet system under the hull body and inside a tunnel. Since this system, like a water jet, is inside the tunnel, the design idea of this system is a combination of a water jet and pump jet. In this paper, hydrodynamic performance of linear jet propulsion system is numerically investigated. To this end, the OpenFOAM software is utilized and RANS steady equations are solved using a - turbulent model. The linear jet geometry is produced by assembling a Kaplan rotor, stator with a NACA 5505 cross section, and a decelerating duct. The results of numerical solution in the form of thrust, torque coefficient, and efficiency are compared with available experimental data for a ducted propeller, and good agreement is displayed. Subsequently, the hydrodynamic parameters are computed in two conditions: with a stator and without a stator. By comparing the results, it is observed that the total thrust coefficient of the propulsion system with a stator at all advance ratios increases by at least 40%. It is further observed that addition of a stator also improves its efficiency.

Online monitoring of high-speed rotating blades has always been a hot topic. Of the various methods, the blade tip timing (BTT) technique, based on eddy current sensors, is considered to be the most promising. However, BTT signals are easily influenced by various factors, which means that the accurate extraction of BTT signals remains a challenge. To try to solve this problem, the causes of measurement error were analyzed. The three main reasons for the error were established: the variation in blade tip clearance, the interference of background noise, and the asymmetry of the blade tip shape. Further, pertinent improvement methods were proposed, and a compensation method was proposed for the errors caused by the variation of tip clearance. A new denoising and shaping algorithm based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) was introduced for the errors caused by background noise. Additionally, an optimal installation position of the sensor was also proposed for the errors caused by the asymmetry of the blade tip shape. Finally, simulations and experiments were used to demonstrate the improved methodology. The results show that the measurement error on vibration amplitude and vibration frequency using the proposed method is less than 2.89% and 0.17%, respectively, which is much lower than the traditional method (24.44% and 0.39%, respectively).