Experimental Analysis of a Cracked Cardan Shaft System under the Influence of Viscous Hydrodynamic Forces

Abstract

Accurate prediction of the dynamic behavior of coupled shafts in a fluid medium is crucial to accurately estimate equipment life and enable safe operation. However, this task is far from trivial due to the vibrations induced by the highly nonlinear nature of the machine system. This paper presents an experimental analysis of a cardan shaft under the influence of viscous hydrodynamic forces. An experimental setup was created using a cardan shaft rig installed in a plexiglas tank, with a self-aligned crack simulator supporting the driveshaft for crack extraction. Adequate instrumentation was used to measure the rotor’s fluctuation under industrial viscous fluid at various motor speeds. By analyzing the changes of unwanted high vibration, the obtained results demonstrated that the characteristics of the cracks in the fluid medium can be efficiently extracted from multiple tests using the wavelet synchrosqueezing transform and energy spectrum. This latter aspect, in particular, implies that the responses that can be observed in practice are highly sensitive to the values of the system parameters: average flow velocity, mass eccentricity, and shaft stiffness, among others. Finally, the study provides conclusions on practical applications for the reliable identification of cracks in a viscous fluid to validate the recently published theoretical study.