Vibration monitoring of rotor bearing system using MFS-lite

Abstract

Vibrations in rotating machinery are commonly the result of mechanical faults including mass unbalance, coupling misalignment, mechanical looseness etc. Rotating machinery with overhung rotors is very common in industries. Unbalanced rotor and misaligned shafts usually cause excessive machine vibration, generates large forces on bearings and thus reduces the machine life span and may lead to property loss and even loss of human life. Two-plane balancing of overhung rotors is one of the most challenging problem that maintenance engineers may encounter. As a prerequisite, successful diagnosis of unbalanced overhung rotor system must be performed. The vibration signatures of unbalanced overhung rotors with unknown initial conditions are different from those of the systems with centre hung rotors that has been studied in the present work. Experiments were carried out on a Machinery Fault Simulator-Lite (MFS-Lite) for both balanced and unbalanced rotor systems. The data were analysed using the Balance Quest software and efforts were focused on identifying the system characteristic signatures. Further, the results were verified through analytical methods and the results were found to be satisfactory.