Dynamic behaviours of a full floating ring bearing supported turbocharger rotor with engine excitation

The rotor dynamic behaviour of turbochargers (TC) has been paid significant attention because of its importance in their healthy operation. Commonly, the TC is firmly mounted on engines and they will definitely suffer from the vibrations originated from engines in operation. However, only a limited number of papers have been published with consideration of this phenomenon. In this paper, a finite element model of a TC rotor supported by nonlinear floating ring bearings has been established. The nonlinear bearing forces have been calculated by a newly proposed analytical method. An efficient numerical integration approach has been employed to conduct the investigation including the traditional unbalance and the considered engine excitation effects in question. The results show that the unbalance will place considerable influence on the rotor response at a low working speed. At high speeds, the effect will be prevented by the dominant sub-synchronous vibrations, which also prohibit the appearance of a chaotic state. The novel investigation with the proposed model considering engine excitation reveals that the engine induced vibration will greatly affect the TC rotor response at relatively lower rotor speeds as well. At higher speed range, the dominant effect of sub-synchronous vibrations is still capable of keeping the same orbit shapes as that without engine excitation from a relative viewpoint. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.