Feature Recognition on Friction Induced Vibration of Water-Lubricated Bearing under Low Speed and Heavy Load

Abstract

Under low speed and heavy load operating conditions, the marine water-lubricated bearing (WLB) is often in a mixed lubrication state. This leads to abnormal friction-induced vibrations and noise in underwater vehicles. An empirical mode decomposition (EMD) based method for identifying friction-induced vibration characteristics of WLB was proposed, and friction-induced vibration experiments of WLB were carried out. The results showed that the specific pressure and lubricant temperature significantly affected friction-induced vibrations while the cooling water flow hardly had an effect. Studying the monotonicity of the eigenvalues of IMF energy, time-domain standard deviation, bias angle, and center of gravity frequency can visualize the trend of the bearing friction-induced vibration signals. Among them, the critical point of friction-induced vibrations could be analyzed by the inflection point of IMF energy, standard deviation, bias angle, and the sudden increase of the center of gravity frequency. The study results were valuable for revealing the friction-induced vibration mechanism of WLB and providing an important reference for design optimization.