Bifurcations of periodic motion of a horizontally supported nonlinear Jeffcott rotor system having transversely cracked shaft

This article investigates the periodic motion bifurcations of a horizontally supported nonlinear Jeffcott rotor system having transversely cracked shaft. The nonlinear spring characteristics due to Hertz contact force and bearing clearance, disc weight, disc eccentricity, breathing of the shaft crack, and angle between the crack and imbalance directions are included in the system model. A mathematical model governing the cracked system lateral vibrations is derived and then analyzed utilizing asymptotic analysis in the primary resonance case. Effects of disc eccentricity, creak depth, and angle between the crack and imbalance directions on the system response curves are studied. The analysis revealed that at a small crack depth, the system executes both forward and backward whirling motions at a specific range of the disc spinning speed, while the backward whirling orbits disappear as the crack depth increases. In addition, at zero disc eccentricity, the cracked system does not oscillate unless the system linear stiffness coefficient is reduced by about 11% as a result of shaft crack. Moreover, there is a spinning speed range of the rotating shaft at which two stable periodic solution attractors appear beside the trivial solution one when the linear stiffness coefficient of the system is reduced to 20% or more. The obtained analytical results are confirmed numerically that showed a very good agreement with the numerical ones. Finally, the acquired results are compared with the work published in the literature.