Experimental Investigation of Pedestal Looseness in a Rotor-Bearing System

An experimental setup of rotor-bearing system is installed and vibration characteristics of the system with pedestal looseness are investigated. The pretightening bolt between the bearing house and pedestal is adjusted to simulate the pedestal looseness fault. The vibration waveforms, spectra and orbits are used to analyze the nonlinear response of the system with pedestal looseness. Different parameters, including speed, looseness gap, imbalance mass and disk position are changed to observe the nonlinear vibration characteristics. The experiments show that the system motion generally contains the 1/2X fractional harmonic component and multiple harmonic components such as 2X, 3X, etc. Under some special conditions, the pedestal looseness occurs intermittently, that is, occurs in some periods and doesn’t in other periods.