Nonlinear Numerical Prediction of Gas Foil Bearing Stability and Unbalanced Response

One of the main interests of gas foil bearings lies in their superior rotordynamic characteristics compared with conventional bearings. A numerical investigation on the stability limit and on the unbalanced response of foil bearings is presented in this paper. The main difficulty in modeling the dynamic behavior of such bearings comes from the dry friction that occurs within the foil structure. Indeed, dry friction is highly nonlinear and is strongly influenced by the dynamic amplitude of the pressure field. To deal with these nonlinearities, a structural dynamic model has been developed in a previous work. This model considers the entire corrugated foil and the interactions between the bumps by describing the foil bearing structure as a multiple degrees of freedom system. It allows the determination of the dynamic friction forces at the top and at the bottom of the bumps by simple integration of ordinary differential equations. The dynamic displacements of the entire corrugated sheet are then easily obtained at each time step. The coupling between this structural model and a gas bearing prediction code is presented in this paper and allows performing full nonlinear analyses of a complete foil bearing. The bearing stability is the first investigated problem. The results show that the structural deflection enhances the stability of compliant surface bearings compared with rigid ones. Moreover, when friction is introduced, a new level of stability is reached, revealing the importance of this dissipation mechanism. The second investigated problem is the unbalanced response of foil bearings. The shaft trajectories depict a nonlinear jump in the response of both rigid and foil bearings when the value of the unbalance increases. Again, it is evidenced that the foil bearing can support higher mass unbalance before this undesirable step occurs.