Optimal placement of water-lubricated rubber bearings for vibration reduction of flexible multistage rotor systems

Flexible multistage rotor systems with water-lubricated rubber bearings (WLRBs) have a variety of engineering applications. Filling a technical gap in the literature, this effort proposes a method of optimal bearing placement that minimizes the vibration amplitude of a WLRB-supported flexible rotor system with a minimum number of bearings. In the development, a new model of WLRBs and a distributed transfer function formulation are used to define a mixed continuous-and-discrete optimization problem. To deal with the case of uncertain number of WLRBs in rotor design, a virtual bearing method is devised. Solution of the optimization problem by a real-coded genetic algorithm yields the locations and lengths of water-lubricated rubber bearings, by which the prescribed operational requirements for the rotor system are satisfied. The proposed method is applicable either to preliminary design of a new rotor system with the number of bearings unforeknown or to redesign of an existing rotor system with a given number of bearings. Numerical examples show that the proposed optimal bearing placement is efficient, accurate and versatile in different design cases.