4

Dynamic Behaviour of Rotating

Machinery

4.1 Rotors and structures

The preceding chapters have been devoted to the study of the dynamic behaviour
of structures, i.e., of mechanical systems that are stationary with respect to an inertial
frame of reference, apart from the vibratory motion that is the object of the study.
Many machine elements, however, do not comply with this definition since, owing
to their rotational motion, it is not possible to define an inertial system of reference
in which the element is stationary.
The present section will be devoted to the study of the dynamic behaviour of rotors.
Following the ISO definition, a rotor is a body suspended through a set of cylindrical
hinges or bearings that allow it to rotate freely about an axis fixed in space. Trans-
mission shafts, parts of reciprocating machines that have only rotational motion and
many other rotating machine elements can then be considered rotors. If no reference
is made to the type of the supports or even to their actual existence, a space vehicle
or a celestial body that rotates about an axis whose direction in space is constant can
also be regarded as rotors, at least for some of the features of their behaviour. The
parts of the machine that do not rotate will be referred to with the general definition
of stator.
Some simplifying assumptions allowing the building of mathematical models that
are not too complex for the dynamic study of rotors must be stated. The equations
that describe the motion of even a simple rigid body in the tridimensional space are
actually quite complex, particularly when dealing with the rotational degrees of
freedom, and do not allow use of any linearized model. Once the reference frames
xyz and ~T\~ (the frrst inertial and the second fixed to the rigid body and coinciding
with its principal axes of inertia) are stated, the six equations of motion under the
action of the generic force F and moment M can be written in the form

G. Genta, Vibration of Structures and Machines

© Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. 1995
210 4. Dynamic Behaviour of Rotating Machinery

M~ =nr!~+nTP.~(J~-J'f})
{M'f} =D..!'f} +nf,n~(JCJ~) (4-1)

M~=n-l~+nA(J'f}-J~) .

The last three equations for the rotational degrees of freedom, which are the
well-known Euler equations, are clearly nonlinear in the angular velocity n.
However, some simplifications that allow the linearization of the equations related
to the rotational degrees of freedom can be made for the case of rotors. The rotor
has, in the undeformed configuration, a well-defmed and fixed rotation axis, which
coincides with one of the baricentrical principal axes of inertia, if the rotor is perfectly
balanced. Actually, this is true only approximately, but the unbalance, i.e., the
deviation from this ideal condition, is usually small. The displacement of the
rotational axis from its nominal position due to the deformations of the system is
also assumed to be small. The two assumptions of small unbalance and small
displacement allow the linearization of the equations of motion in a way that is
consistent with what has been seen for the case of the dynamics of structures where
similar small-displacement assumptions were required to obtain linear equations of
motion.
Some cases that, strictly speaking, could not be studied using the aforementioned
assumptions, can, nevertheless, be dealt with in the same way. Consider as an example
the rotor of an aircraft gas turbine during maneuvred flight. The direction of the axis
of the rotor changes continuously in time, and no small-angle assumption can be
considered for this motion. However, the motion of the rotor can be studied in a
reference frame that is fixed to the aircraft, provided that the motion of the latter can
be considered independent from the dynamic behaviour of the first and the related
inertia forced are added. This way of separating the problem into its dynamic and
quasi static parts is possible if the characteristic times of the different phenomena
under study are widely different. In the example above this is clearly the case if the
frequencies that characterize the motion of the rotor of the turbine with respect to
the aircraft are of several Hertz (periods of fractions of seconds), while the rotations
of the airframe have characteristic times of the order of several seconds. On the
contrary, the seismic actions on the rotor of a machine in a building can have fre-
quencies that are of the same order of magnitude as those that characterize the rotor
itself, and the problem may have to be studied without any uncoupling being possible.
Another common assumption is that of axial symmetry of the rotor. If this
assumption holds, the dynamic study is greatly simplified and a nonrotating reference
frame is usually also chosen for the study of rotor motions. If, on the contrary, the
rotor cannot be considered axially symmetrical, the study becomes very complicated,
unless an axial symmetry assumption can be made on the nonrotating parts of the
system. In the latter case a reference frame that rotates at the angular velocity of the
rotor can be used and simplified equations can be obtained. If both stator and rotor
are isotropic with respect to the rotation axis, particularly simple models can be
devised.