Experimental and numerical studies on partial similitude of rotor system considering the vibration consistency

Abstract

Similitude theory can be utilized to perform scaled experiments and facilitate the understanding of physical behaviors of large structures. However, the prediction accuracy in partial similitude is still needed to be improved. To address the problem, a partial similitude method is presented to improve the prediction accuracy. The vibration consistency is satisfied by developing the scaling laws of critical speed. In addition, the scaling laws of vibration response are developed after ensuring consistency. The ability and performance of the presented method are demonstrated using a simulation case study and an experiment case study. In both case studies, the presented method is utilized to reproduce the vibration responses of the prototype, which includes the predictions of resonant and non-resonant responses. Besides, the prediction results of the existing methods are also provided for comparison. In the numerical case, the errors of the proposed method are less than 3% in predicting the vibration amplitude. In the experimental case, the minimum and maximum errors are 0.1% and 14.4%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed method can achieve better performance than the current methods.