Experimental Measurements of Actively Controlled Bearing Damping With an Electrorheological Fluid

Selection criteria and design evaluations of several types of bearing dampers with active control for application to aircraft engines were described in a companion paper (Vance, Ying, and Nikolajsen, 1999). A disk type electrorheological (ER) damper was chosen for further study and testing. The results of the tests and the final conclusions of the study are described in this paper. Experimental results including stiffness and damping coefficients are presented for the ER bearing damper with two types of ER fluid, 350 CS and 10 CS (centistokes) viscosity. The vibration attenuation performance of the ER damper was measured on a rotordynamic test rig in the form of free vibration decay, rotor orbits, and runup unbalance responses. The results show that the ER fluid with lower viscosity has the better characteristics for rotordynamic applications. It was found that ER fluids produce both Coulomb and viscous damping. If only the damping is considered, the Coulomb type is less desirable, but with active control it can also achieve control of rotor stiffness as analyzed in Vance and San Andres (1999). A feedback control system was developed and applied to the ER damper with the objective of improving the overall rotordynamic performance of the rotor bearing system, considering both vibration amplitudes and dynamic bearing forces. A “bang-bang” (on and off) simple control logic was found to work better in practice than more sophisticated schemes. The measured runup responses of the rotor-bearing system with this control approximated the desired vibration response curves fairly well. The tests highlighted some of the practical considerations that would be important for aircraft engine applications, such as the ER fluid limitations, the electrical power supply requirements, the electrical insulation requirements, the nonlinear relationship between the voltage and the damping, and the relative benefits of active control. It is concluded that active control of bearing damping is probably not a practical improvement over the passive squeeze film dampers currently used in most aircraft gas turbine engines.