Global Stability Analysis of Cylindrical and Dual Offset Rotor Bearing Systems

Extensive numerical simulation studies with a short bearing film model show that a balanced dual offset rotor bearing subjected to a fixed external load can improve bearing performance for load and speed conditions known to produce undesirable half-speed whirl in conventional zero-offset cylindrical systems. For specific values of dimensionless load, offset ratio, and load orientation, parametric changes in speed show that the dual offset bearing can undergo a variety of bifurcations which produce coexisting period 1–4 subharmonic, quasi-periodic, and chaotic attractors, all of which may be driven by lower-order dynamic processes. For a specific set of initial conditions, the transition to chaos via period doubling in the dual offset bearing actually produces lubricant films which are significantly thicker than those found in the corresponding cylindrical system.