Design Equations for Wire Mesh Bearing Dampers in Turbomachinery

In a previous ASME paper the second author reported experiments on wire mesh bearing dampers (WMD) incorporated in a power turbine rotor-bearing system in order to enable a direct comparison between WMD and squeeze film dampers (SFD). The results showed that both WMD and SFD perform equally well for reducing the rotordynamic amplitudes of vibration. Moreover the WMD were found to have significant advantages over SFD. The damping provided by the wire mesh is independent of temperature changes and presence of turbine oil. Experiments by another investigator showed that WMD are capable of sustaining more than twice the unbalance as compared to SFD, which promises possible application to withstand blade loss loads. This paper presents empirically developed non-dimensional design equations for WMD, capable of predicting stiffness and damping for a wire mesh ‘donut’ subject to changes in various design, installation, and operational parameters.