Towards a general method for estimating the unbalanced magnetic pull in mixed eccentricities motion including sufficiently large eccentricities in a hydropower generator and their validation against EM simulations

Electromagnetic (EM) analysis of hydropower generators is common practice but rotor whirling is little studied. This paper suggests a novel semi-analytical method for estimating the steady state unbalanced magnetic pull (UMP) when the rotor centre is undergoing mixed eccentricities motion. The ability to estimate the UMP for mixed eccentricities motion in finite element method (FEM)-based modelling software packages is rare. The proposed methodology in its formulation takes advantage of the fact that a purely dynamic eccentricity motion including non-synchronous whirling and a purely static eccentricity motion can be more amenable to implement in existing FEM-based EM modelling software products for UMP estimation. After these initial separate UMP results are obtained, the proposed method can be applied for virtually any mixed eccentricities motion cases up to sufficiently large eccentricities for quick analysis instead of running the mixed eccentricities simulations directly in a FEM-based software package. Good agreement between the UMP from the actual EM mixed eccentricities motion simulations in a commercial FEM-based software package and the UMP estimations by the novel method is made for a wide range of eccentricities that may commonly occur in practice. A modified feature selective validation (FSV) method, the FSV-UPC, is applied to assess the similarities and the differences in the UMP computations.