On the Dynamic Response of Rigid Rotor Supported by Rolling-Element Bearing

A prototype of a system is a numerical model. It is used to generate large amount of data and can be a successful replacement to experiment,which is often difficult to conduct and moreover is expensive. This article deals with the development of two models of rotor supported by deep groove rolling-element bearings to study the dynamic response. The bearing models are 5-DOFs and multi-body dynamics is developed using Matlab-Simulink and the bond graph environment. The systems of equations generated by modeling rolling-element bearing using these two approaches are theoretically simulated. The effects of speed variations in the dynamic response using these two models are investigated. The three regions namely, periodic, quasi-periodic, and chaotic are seen on the 5-DOFs rotor supported by rolling-element bearing model with increasing speed, whereas bearing model based on multi-body dynamics approach gives only chaotic response for each speed. Thus, using these two modeling approaches, a comparative study of the magnitude and characteristics of rotor motion can be done, and can be used to infer the vibratory nature of rotor in rolling-element bearing.