Mechanical Engineering - Theses

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    Active vibration control of rotor-bearing systems
    Sun, Linxiang ( 1995)
    This thesis is concerned with the active vibration control of rotating machinery utilizing an active journal bearing. The main objectives are to develop general mathematical model of rotor systems incorporating the active journal bearing, for the purposes of dynamic analysis and control synthesis, and to formulate the control concepts for the vibration control. The presence of suitable active bearings plays a very important part in the active vibration control of rotating machinery. A new active journal bearing has been proposed in the thesis in which a flexible sleeve and a pressure chamber are initially introduced to a conventional design of journal bearings. Fluid-induced self-excited vibration or instability is a serious problem in a rotor system supported upon oil-film journal bearings. In the case of a rotor system supported on conventional journal bearings only, there is no means to improve the system stability without stopping the operation of the machine. With the inclusion of the active journal bearing, the numerical analysis has illustrated that by simply applying an appropriate constant chamber pressure in the active journal bearing, the stability of the rotor system can be improved effectively. No sophisticated feedback control calculations and equipment are needed. The altering of the chamber pressure can be performed at any time while the machine is operating. The stability analysis has proved that it is always possible to increase the range of the configuration parameters as well as the range of the rotating speed within which the equilibrium position of the system is asymptotically stable. Outside these ranges of stability, great attenuation of the amplitude of the self-excited vibration can be achieved. An optimal open-loop vibration control algorithm has been presented for the control of forced vibration due to the mass imbalance in the rotor. The synchronous vibration is minimized in a least squares sense. Numerical simulations have shown that the proposed optimal open-loop control strategy is very effective in reducing the amplitude of the forced vibration. In contrast to conventional balancing techniques, the optimal open-loop strategy does not require an estimate of the unbalance distribution in the rotor, and more significantly, it can be implemented in the rotor system at any time without stopping the machine. The dynamic problems in a rotor system supported by fluid-film bearings are essentially non-linear. For a complex rotor system, it is a very difficult task to accurately model the real system due to inadequate measurements of some parameters. Some parameters may change with time or under different operating conditions. A fixed-parameter controller may not be able to handle such non-linearity, parameter uncertainty and variation with time. The multivariable self-tuning adaptive controller adopted in this thesis has shown to be able to cope with those difficulties. The numerical simulation has demonstrated that the proposed self-tuning controller is suitable for the forced vibration control of the rotor system incorporating the active journal bearing. The amplitude of the synchronous vibration has been significantly reduced. The self-tuning algorithm requires no pre-knowledge of the parameters of the rotor-bearing system and the unbalance distribution. The controller can adjust its parameters to adapt to the changes of the parameters of the rotor system. Since the proposed self-tuning controller is based on the input/output model, it is easy to implement in practical applications. The control algorithm is presented quite generally. It may be used as a general procedure in the applications of the active vibration control related with rotor-bearing systems. An experimental rig incorporating the proposed active journal bearing has been designed and constructed. Experimental investigations have been conducted on the rig to provide experimental support to the developed theory.