Bifurcation analysis for nonlinear multi-degree-of-freedom rotor system with liquid-film lubricated bearings

The oil-film oscillation in a large rotating machinery is a complex high-dimensional nonlinear problem. In this paper, a high pressure rotor of an aero engine with a pair of liquid-film lubricated bearings is modeled as a twenty-two-degree-of-freedom nonlinear system by the Lagrange method. This high-dimensional nonlinear system can be reduced to a two-degree-of-freedom system preserving the oil-film oscillation property by introducing the modified proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) method. The efficiency of the method is shown by numerical simulations for both the original and reduced systems. The Chen-Longford (C-L) method is introduced to get the dynamical behaviors of the reduced system that reflect the natural property of the oil-film oscillation.