The dynamic behavior of a rotor system with a slant crack on the shaft

Abstract For a Jeffcott rotor system with a 45° slant crack on the shaft, the motion equations are established with four directions, i.e. two transversal directions, one torsional direction and one longitudinal direction. It can be seen from the deducing process of the stiffness with the strain energy release approach that there are coupling stiffnesses of bending–torsion, bending–tension and torsion–tension for the slant-cracked shaft and only bending–tension for the transverse-cracked one. The paper shows that besides the coupling stiffnesses, there is bending–torsion coupling caused by the eccentricity. All these couplings affect the responses of the slant-cracked shaft and the transverse-cracked one. Comparing responses of a cracked shaft with an open crack model and those with a breathing crack model finds that there are the same prominent characteristic frequencies for these two kinds of shafts, even though the cracked shaft with a breathing crack model behaves much more non-linear than that with an open crack model. Therefore, almost all studies in this paper adopt the open crack model since it needs taking much longer time to compute responses of a breathing cracked shaft than that of an open cracked shaft. Analyses of steady responses indicate that the combined frequencies of the rotating speed and the torsional excitation in the transversal response and the frequency of the torsional excitation in the longitudinal response can be used to detect the slant crack on the shaft of the rotor system.