Near-field beamforming analysis for acoustic emission source localization

This paper attempts to introduce a near-field acoustic emission (AE) beamforming method to estimate the AE source locations by using a small array of sensors closely placed in a local region. The propagation characteristics of AE signals are investigated based on guided wave theory to discuss the feasibility of using beamforming techniques in AE signal processing. To validate the effectiveness of the AE beamforming method, a series of pencil lead break tests at various regions of a thin steel plate are conducted. The potential of this method for engineering applications are explored through rotor-stator rubbing tests. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively determine the region where rubbing occurs. It is expected that the work of this paper may provide a helpful analysis tool for near-field AE source localization.     

Modeling of a rotor speed transient response with radial rubbing

A rotor-stator model of a turbogenerator is introduced in order to investigate speed transients with rotor-to-stator rubbing caused by an accidental blade-off imbalance. In order to assess the angular deceleration of the rotor due to rubbing, the angular position of its cross-section is considered as an unknown of the problem. Displacement fields are discretized through a finite element formulation. The highly nonlinear equations due to contact conditions are solved through an explicit prediction-correction time-marching procedure combined with the Lagrange multiplier approach dealing with a node-to-line contact strategy. The developed numerical tool is suitable for analyzing rotor-stator interactions in turbomachines as the system passes through critical speeds during an accidental shutdown. The sensitivity of the system response to modeling, physical and numerical parameters is investigated. The results highlight the significant role of the friction coefficient together with the diaphragm modeling, from rigid to fully flexible, in the interaction phenomenon. Rigid models have the advantage of simplicity and provide reasonable estimations of the overall response of the turbine. A flexible model, however, may be more computationally intensive but is more appropriate in order to accurately capture quantities of interest such as shaft eccentricity and bearing loads.     

Rotor–stator contact dynamics using a non-ideal drive—Theoretical and experimental aspects

The possible contact between rotor and stator is considered a serious malfunction that may lead to catastrophic failure. Rotor rub is seen as a secondary phenomenon caused by a primary source, i.e. sudden mass unbalance, instabilities generated by aerodynamic and hydrodynamic forces in seals and bearings among others. The contact event gives rise to normal and friction forces exerted on the rotor at impact events. The friction force plays a significant role by transferring some rotational energy of the rotor to lateral motion. A mathematical model has been developed to capture this for a conventional backup annular guide setup. It is reasonable to superpose an impact condition to the rub, where the rotor spin energy can be fully transformed into rotor lateral movements. Using a nonideal drive, i.e. an electric motor without any kind of velocity feedback control, it is even possible to stop the rotor spin under rubbing conditions. All the rotational energy will be transformed in a kind of “self-excited” rotor lateral vibration with repeated impacts against the housing. This paper studies the impact motion of a rotor impacting a conventional backup annular guide for the case of dry and lubricated inner surface of the guide. For the dry surface case, the experimental and numerical analysis shows that the rotational energy is fully transformed into lateral motion and the rotor spin is stopped. Based on this study this paper proposes a new unconventional backup bearing design in order to reduce the rub related severity in friction and center the rotor at impact events. The analysis shows that the rotor at impacts is forced to the center of the backup bearing and the lateral motion is mitigated. As a result of this, the rotor spin is kept constant.     

Analysis on accuracy improvement of rotor–stator rubbing localization based on acoustic emission beamforming method

This paper attempts to introduce an improved acoustic emission (AE) beamforming method to localize rotor–stator rubbing fault in rotating machinery. To investigate the propagation characteristics of acoustic emission signals in casing shell plate of rotating machinery, the plate wave theory is used in a thin plate. A simulation is conducted and its result shows the localization accuracy of beamforming depends on multi-mode, dispersion, velocity and array dimension. In order to reduce the effect of propagation characteristics on the source localization, an AE signal pre-process method is introduced by combining plate wave theory and wavelet packet transform. And the revised localization velocity to reduce effect of array size is presented. The accuracy of rubbing localization based on beamforming and the improved method of present paper are compared by the rubbing test carried on a test table of rotating machinery. The results indicate that the improved method can localize rub fault effectively.     

Rotor drop and following thermal growth simulations using detailed auxiliary bearing and damper models

Catcher bearings (CBs) or auxiliary bearings provide mechanical backup protection in the events of magnetic bearing failure. This paper presents numerical analysis for a rotor drop on CBs and following thermal growths due to their mechanical rub using detailed CB and damper models. The detailed CB model is determined based on its material, geometry, speed and preload using the nonlinear Hertzian load–deflection formula, and the thermal growths of bearing components during the rotor drop are estimated using a 1D thermal model. A finite-element squeeze film damper provides the pressure profile of an annular oil film and the resulting viscous damping force. Numerical simulations of an energy storage flywheel with magnetic suspensions failed reveal that an optimal CB design using the detailed simulation models stabilizes the rotor drop dynamics and lowers the thermal growths while preventing the high-speed backward whirl. Furthermore, CB design guides based on the simulation results are presented.     

DYNAMIC BEHAVIOR OF THE FULL ROTORSTOP RUBBING: NUMERICAL SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATION

The dynamic behavior of a rotor rubbing, especially rubbing fully with a motion-limiting stop is investigated by numerical and experimental methods. In the dynamic simulation, the sinuous excitation force with low frequency excites the large whirl of the unbalanced rotor and thus causes the rubbing between the rotor and the stop. The simple Coulomb friction model and the multiple segments linear spring model are used to reveal the nature of the rubbing forces. The torque equation of the rotor is built to extract the rotating speed during partial and full rubbing. The stable partial rubbing motion demonstrates that the stop limits the violent vibration amplitude of the rotor effectively. The rubbing experiments confirm the idea of using the inner type of stop to suppress the violent backward whirl with low frequency. When the amplitude of the excitation force exceeds a certain value, the full rubbing occurs with serious continuous friction. During full rubbing, the center of the rotor moves counter-clockwise and whips in the amplitude exceeding the rotor/stop gap dramatically. Moreover, the whip frequency is much higher than the frequencies of the excitation and the unbalance force. And then the rotor rotation is broken quickly by the stop. The predicted dynamical behavior is verified by the rubbing experiments. The relation between the stop/bearing stiffness ratio and such dynamical behavior as the initiation of the rubbing, the over-limit ratio and the contact-ratio is discussed.     

并行平台上的CFD通用界面标准-第二部分:CFD应用

在建立了并行平台上的CFD通用界面标准后,就可以规范的将一般的CFD程序改为基于通用界面标准的并行程序.在这个标准基础上开发了基于WINDOWS NT系统的WINSOCK并行平台,搭建了基于LINUX系统的PVM并行平台.将这两个平台应用于转子叶尖顶部流动的模拟,捕捉到了激波附面层相互干扰及叶片顶部泄漏等现象;应用于叶轮机械动静叶片非定常气动干涉的数值模拟,验证了PVM平台和通用界面标准的实用性和可行性.     

Energy Index technique for detection of Acoustic Emissions associated with incipient bearing failures

The application of Acoustic Emission (AE) technique to condition monitoring of gears and bearings is gaining significance as it can detect early symptoms of defects such as pitting, wear and flaking of surfaces. Such early detection of defects is of vital importance so as to avoid major failures with catastrophic consequences. This article presents results on the Energy Index (EI) technique, used in detecting masked AE signatures associated with the loss of mechanical integrity in bearings. Both simulated and real experimentally generated AE signatures were used to investigate the efficiency and applicability of the technique at signal-to-noise ratios as low as 0.25. In conclusion it is shown that the EI technique is effective in detecting AE burst buried in random noise thereby offering a complementary tool for the diagnostician.     

Non-linear dynamics of flexible multi-bearing rotors

A general analysis has been developed to computer simulate steady state and transient vibration phenomena of complex rotor-bearing-support systems. A central feature of this analysis is a proper handling of various highly non-linear effects (most notably journal bearings) which dominate the dynamic phenoména encountered during large amplitude rotor-bearing vibrations. There are a number of potential causes of large amplitude rotor vibration, such as high rotor imbalance (e.g., loss of turbine blades at running speed), critical speed operation, journal bearing dynamic instability (oil whip), earthquakes, and shock. Failure mode analysis requires the evaluation and understanding of such potentially large dynamic forces and displacements. The paper presents development of the analysis, comparison with experiment and examples of its use in industrial applications.     

Low speed bearing fault diagnosis using acoustic emission sensors

In this paper, a new methodology for low speed bearing fault diagnosis is presented. This acoustic emission (AE) based technique starts with a heterodyne frequency reduction approach that samples AE signals at a rate comparable to vibration centered methodologies. Then, the sampled AE signal is time synchronously resampled to account for possible fluctuations in shaft speed and bearing slippage. The resampling approach is able to segment the AE signal according to shaft crossing times such that an even number of data points are available to compute a single spectral average which is used to extract features and evaluate numerous condition indicators (CIs) for bearing fault diagnosis. Unlike existing averaging based noise reduction approaches that require the computation of multiple averages for each bearing fault type, the presented approach computes only one average for all bearing fault types. The presented technique is validated using the AE signals of seeded fault steel bearings on a bearing test rig. The results in this paper have shown that the low sampled AE signals in combination with the presented approach can be utilized to effectively extract condition indicators to diagnose all four bearing fault types at multiple low shaft speeds below 10 Hz.     

Quantum entanglement formation by repeated spin blockade measurements in a spin field-effect transistor structure embedded with quantum dots

We propose a method of operating a quantum state machine made of stacked quantum dots buried in adjacent to the channel of a spin field-effect transistor (FET) [S. Datta, B. Das, Appl. Phys. Lett. 56 (1990) 665; K. Yoh, et al., Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Physics of Semiconductors (ICPS) 2004; H. Ohno, K. Yoh et al., Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. 42 (2003) L87; K. Yoh, J. Konda, S. Shiina, N. Nishiguchi, Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. 36 (1997) 4134]. In this method, a spin blockade measurement extracts the quantum state of a nearest quantum dot through Coulomb blockade [K. Yoh, J. Konda, S. Shiina, N. Nishiguchi, Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. 36 (1997) 4134; K. Yoh, H. Kazama, Physica E 7 (2000) 440] of the adjacent channel conductance. Repeated quantum Zeno-like (QZ) measurements [H. Nakazato, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 90 (2003) 060401] of the spin blockade is shown to purify the quantum dot states within several repetitions. The growth constraints of the stacked InAs quantum dots are shown to provide an exchange interaction energy in the range of 0.01–1 meV [S. Itoh, et al., Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. 38 (1999) L917; A. Tackeuchi, et al., Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. 42 (2003) 4278]. We have verified that one can reach the fidelity of 90% by repeating the measurement twice, and that of 99.9% by repeating only eleven QZ measurements. Entangled states with two and three vertically stacked dots are achieved with the sampling frequency of the order of 100 MHz.     

Roller bearing acoustic signature extraction by wavelet packet transform,applications in fault detection and size estimation

Continuous online monitoring of rotating machines is necessary to assess real-time health conditions so as to enable early detection of operation problems and thus reduce the possibility of downtime. Rolling element bearings are crucial parts of many machines and there has been an increasing demand to find effective and reliable health monitoring technique and advanced signal processing to detect and diagnose the size and location of incipient defects. Condition monitoring of rolling element bearings, comprises four main stages which are, statistical analysis, fault diagnostics, defect size calculation, and prognostics. In this paper the effect of defect size, operating speed, and loading conditions on statistical parameters of acoustic emission (AE) signals, using design of experiment method (DOE), have been investigated to select the most sensitive parameters for diagnosing incipient faults and defect growth on rolling element bearings. A modified and effective signal processing algorithm is designed to diagnose localized defects on rolling element bearings components under different operating speeds, loadings, and defect sizes. The algorithm is based on optimizing the ratio of Kurtosis and Shannon entropy to obtain the optimal band pass filter utilizing wavelet packet transform (WPT) and envelope detection. Results show the superiority of the developed algorithm and its effectiveness in extracting bearing characteristic frequencies from the raw acoustic emission signals masked by background noise under different operating conditions. To experimentally measure the defect size on rolling element bearings using acoustic emission technique, the proposed method along with spectrum of squared Hilbert transform are performed under different rotating speeds, loading conditions, and defect sizes to measure the time difference between the double AE impulses. Measurement results show the power of the proposed method for experimentally measuring size of different fault shapes using acoustic emission signals.     

The global responses characteristics of a rotor/stator rubbing system with dry friction effects

Rotor/stator rubbing systems may undertake a number of quite different responses. Recent experiments on rotor/stator rubbing have revealed that two or three different responses may coexist. In this paper the global response characteristics of a general rotor/stator rubbing system, which takes into account the dominant factors in the process of rotor/stator rubbing, especially, the dry friction effect that is mostly neglected in the previous works and is the main factor for the self-excited dry friction backward whirl, are studied. The different solutions of the piecewise nonlinear system are derived and their stability are analyzed to get the existence boundaries of the different responses. An overall picture of the global response characteristics of this model is then obtained by drawing the existence boundaries in a same parameter space. The present results provide good understanding on the coexistence of different rubbing responses observed in tests. Moreover, deeper insight into the types of coexistence of different rubbing responses and their relationship with the system parameters is gained.     

Seeded fault detection on helical gears with acoustic emission

Acoustic emission (AE) is one of many technologies for health monitoring and diagnosis of rotating machines such as gearboxes. Although significant research has been undertaken in understanding the potential of AE in monitoring gearboxes this has been solely applied to spur gears. This report presents an experimental investigation that assesses the effectiveness of AE in identifying seeded defects on helical gears; the first known attempt. Additionally vibration analysis has performed to study the effect of seeded defect on the vibration signature of the meshing gears.     

Enhancing nucleation and controlling crystal orientation by rubbing/scratching the surface of a thin polymer film

We used the tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) in the contact mode to scratch/rub the surface of a glassy polymer thin film, i.e., isotactic polystyrene (i-PS) at room temperature. After subsequent isothermal crystallization, an extremely high nucleation density of edge-on crystals within the rubbed region or at the edge of the scratched area was observed. Furthermore, a transition from edge-on to flat-on lamellae occurred beyond a certain distance from the edge of the scratched region. Our results demonstrate that both, soft rubbing or hard scratching, allow to lower the nucleation barrier for polymer crystallization and to control the orientation of the resulting crystalline lamellae. The role of scratching/rubbing on chain deformation and its relation to nucleation and crystal orientation in polymer thin films is discussed.     

1+1/2对转涡轮中激波结构的数值研究

本文对1 1／2对转涡轮中激波及激波／叶排干扰等进行了详细的数值模拟。分析发现,1 1／2对转涡轮高压动叶流道中压缩波系与常规涡轮流道中的压缩波系存在明显的不同。1 1／2对转涡轮高压动叶吸力面60％轴向弦长处产生了一组压缩波,它与内伸波相交。在常规涡轮中,这组压缩波将不会出现;内伸波在吸力面的反射波很强,不能忽略。在常规涡轮中,内伸波的反射波可以忽略。由于尾迹及低压动叶的作用,高压动叶外伸波的影响范围和强度呈现周期性的变化。     

高强度钢手工焊接后过程的声发射实时监测研究

本针对实际工艺中使用的高强度钢，重点对手工焊接的冷却过程利用声发射技术进行实时监测。本次试验是和先前在不同型号的钢板在手工焊接过程中所产生的声发射信号进行比较的基础上进行的，主要目的是寻找高强度钢在手工焊接的冷却中所产生的活性裂纹在冷却阶段的声信号特征。     

Bivariate empirical mode decomposition and its contribution to wind turbine condition monitoring

Accessing difficulties and harsh environments require more advanced condition monitoring techniques to ensure the high availability of offshore wind turbines. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) has been shown to be a promising technique for meeting this need. However, EMD was developed for one-dimensional signals, unable to carry out an information fusion function which is of importance to reach a reliable condition monitoring conclusion. Therefore, bivariate empirical mode decomposition (BEMD) is investigated in this paper to assess whether it could be a better solution for wind turbine condition monitoring. The effectiveness of the proposed technique in detecting machine incipient fault is compared with EMD and a recently developed wavelet-based ‘energy tracking’ technique. Experiments have shown that the proposed BEMD-based technique is more convenient than EMD for processing shaft vibration signals, and more powerful than EMD and wavelet-based techniques in terms of processing the non-stationary and nonlinear wind turbine condition monitoring signals and detecting incipient mechanical and electrical faults.     

A theoretical-experimental comparison of the synchronous response of a bowed rotor in five different sets of fluid film bearings

A comparison of theoretical and experimental synchronous unbalance responses of a bowed Jeffcott rotor in fluid film bearings has been completed. A transfer matrix method was used to predict theoretically the response of a 25·4 mm shaft in fluid film bearings and results were compared to data from a previous experimental study. Four bearing types were used: two axial groove, pressure dam, tilting pad and four-lobe. Very good agreement was found for all bearing types at the rotor critical speed (3000 rpm). Differences less than 15% in peak response were found and the theoretical and experimental peaks were found to occur within 200 rpm. Worst agreement was found for the preloaded four-lobe bearings and this disagreement was found for speeds other than the critical speed. Also, for equal bow and unbalance the tilting pad and four-lobe bearings were found to produce the least and most damping at the critical speed, respectively. Previous to this time a comparison of theoretical and experimental synchronous responses of a rotor system representing industrial turbomachines has not been published, nor has a comparative study of the different bearing types.     

Detailed ball bearing model for magnetic suspension auxiliary service

Catcher bearings (CBs) provide backup protection for rotating machines with active magnetic bearings (AMBs). The CBs are required in the event of an AMB failure or high transient loads. Numerical simulations of a rotor drop on CBs in flywheel energy storage system are conducted with a detailed CB model which includes a Hertzian load–deflection relationship between mechanical contacts, speed-and-preload-dependent bearing stiffness due to centrifugal force, and a Palmgren's drag friction torque. The transient simulation results show the rotor shaft response variations with the design parameters: shaft/bearing friction coefficients, axial preload, support damping of damper liner, and side loads from magnetic bearings. The results reveal that friction coefficients, support damping, and side loads are critical parameters to satisfy CB design objectives and prevent backward (super) whirl.