Dynamics of a rigid unbalanced rotor with nonlinear elastic restoring forces. Part II: experimental analysis

In Part I, theoretical analysis of the dynamic behaviour of a rigid rotor with nonlinear elastic restoring forces was carried out. In this part (Part II), an experimental confirmation of the theoretical data from that analysis was sought. With this aim, an experimental model was set up consisting mainly of a practically rigid rotor clamped onto a small diameter piano wire symmetrical to the wire supports. These supports were rigid and equipped with roller bearings and a device that made it possible to adjust the initial tension in the wire so as to make the elastic restoring forces less or more linear. The rotor was dynamically unbalanced and was driven by an asynchronous motor regulated by means of an inverter in order to adjust the rotor speed. A series of tests was performed on this rig with different values of the initial tension in the wire, and the trajectories of two points on the rotor axis were recorded in the course of the tests. These trajectories were obtained, under the hypothesis of similarity, from the orbits covered by two given sections of the wire and detected with two pairs of capacitive transducers. The collected data was compared with the theoretical results from Part I of the present investigation. Comparison of the collected data with the corresponding theoretical results made it possible to infer that system nonlinearity in the presence of small damping can give rise to motions that are periodic, whether synchronous or not, or quasi-periodic, but never chaotic.