Rotor Bearing Casing with added Polymer Particle Composite

Abstract

The trend of production machines with higher operation speeds brought the issues of vibration amplitude and acoustic emissions to the surface. To solve this problem, a standard approach requiring mass and/or stiffness increase, and utilizing high-damping polymer composite materials, e.g. by adding them to the empty spaces of the original structures is employed. The presented polymer composite application is for rotor bearing casing in which the polymer particle composite is added into the mechanical system by filling the empty space between the rotor bearing casing and the housing body. Before this application, an analysis of four polymer composite samples with different compositions was made. Then the logarithmic decrements were measured by two experimental methods and one composite was selected. The application showed acoustic emission maximum amplitude reduction of 67% and 33% when excitation amplitudes are low (up to 5 g) and large (above 10 g), respectively. In the case of the FFT spectrum of acoustic emissions, the reduction was 85% and 51%.