Nonlinear Vibration Signature Analysis of Rail Axle - Bearing Systems

S. P. Harsha*, V. H. Saran and V. K. Goel

Mechanical & Industrial Engineering Department, IIT-Roorkee, India
Email: surajfme@iitr.ernet.in*, saranfme@iitr.ernet.in , goelvfme@iitr.ernet.in

Abstract Increasingly more people are utilizing their traveling time by railway vehicles, to perform sedentary activities like reading, writing or working on laptop. Apart from track irregularities and or track dynamics, other rail components e.g. primary & secondary suspensions, car body and rail axle roller bearing wheel system affect the vibrations of the seat and thus the ride comfort and his ability to perform the sedentary activities. Vibration analysis of axle box bearings is addressed for monitoring the condition of wagon wheel sets, which is crucial for the safety of high-speed railway traffic. In this paper, nonlinear dynamic analysis of a rail axle-bearing system due to the effects of the number of rolling elements and surface imperfection has been studied. In the analytical formulation, the contacts between rolling elements and races are considered as nonlinear springs, whose stiffness values are obtained by using Hertzian elastic contact deformation theory. The results are presented in the form of time response with acceleration and Fast Fourier Transformations (FFT), which show that the vibration characteristics of the axle and its bearings change when the bearings operate in different regions of their nonlinear load deflection characteristics. The appearance of regions of periodic, sub-harmonic and quasi-periodic response has been observed to be strongly dependent on number of rolling elements. Key Words: Nonlinear dynamics, unbalanced rotor effect, Poincar maps, FFT, Intermittency, and RPF. 1. Introduction An analysis of rolling element bearing dynamic behavior is important to predict the system vibration responses. When rolling element bearings are operated at high speed, they generate vibrations and noise. The principal forces, which drive these vibrations, are the time varying nonlinear contact forces, which exist between the various components of the bearings, i.e. the rolling elements, races with the rotor and wheel. In the rotor bearing assembly supported by perfect rolling element bearings, the vibration spectrum is dominated by the vibrations at the natural frequency and the roller passage frequency (RPF). By vibration monitoring down times and risk of accident in highly productive industrial plants (power generation, steel production), traffic systems (automotive, railway, aircraft), industrial manufacturing (textile industry, lathe tool) and domestic appliances (washing machine) can be minimized. Sophisticated diagnostic equipment based on acceleration sensors and conditioning electronics for signal acquisition, monitoring and processing (feature extraction and defect/fault classification) has been developed [1, 2]. For investigating the structural vibration characteristics of rolling element bearings, a model of the bearing assembly can be considered as a spring mass system, in which the outer race of the bearing is fixed in a rigid support and the inner race is fixed rigidly with the shaft as shown in Fig.1.

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Fig. 1 Rail Axle - Bearing Systems

2. Contact Stiffness Hertz considered the stress and deformation in perfectly smooth, ellipsoidal, contacting elastic solids. Therefore, the line contact between the race and roller develop into an area contact, which has the shape of an ellipse with a and b as the semi major and semi minor axes respectively. The curvature sum and difference are needed in order to obtain the contact force of the roller. Hertz equations for elastic deformation involving line contact between solid Steel bodies are given by Eschmann et al. [3] as:

4.05 Q 0.925 10 5
0. l eff85

(mm )

(1)

Here leff is the length over which rollers are actually in contact. The contact force is:
0. Q = 56065 leff92 1.08

(2)

Hence, the nonlinear stiffness associated with the line contact is given as:
0. k = 56065 leff92 0.08

N mm

(3)

3. Derivation of Governing Equations of Motion The system governing equations accounting for inertia, restoring and damping force and constant vertical force acting on the inner race are as:

m x + c x + k [(x cos i + y sin i ) ( + )]+ 2 cos i = W + Fu cos( t ) m y + c y + k [(x cos i + y sin i ) ( + )]+ 2 sin i = Fu sin ( t )
i =1 i =1 Nb 3

Nb

(4)

4. Results & Discussion The equations of motion (4) are solved by the modified Newmark- method to obtain the radial displacement, velocity and acceleration of the rolling elements. To study the behavior, parameters of the axle box bearing are selected. This is done by examining the time series out put, once per cycle, for sufficiently long segments so that multiple periodic and aperiodic behaviors could be discerned from the post transient solutions. The obtained results in form of accelerationtime response, FFT and Poincar maps are used to confirm the aperiodic nature of chaotic behavior. In the present investigation, an analytical model of a rotor bearing system has been developed to obtain the nonlinear vibration response as a function of varying the number of rolling elements and wave numbers. From the obtained response, the following conclusions are drawn. 1. Nonlinear dynamic responses are found to be associated with rolling element passage frequency. Roller Passage Frequency (RPF) is a system characteristic and prediction about the system behavior can be made by RPF to avoid resonance. When the number of rolling elements is increased, the amplitude of oscillations reduces implying a stiffer system. From this it can be predicted that increasing the number of rolling elements will reduce the effect of the BPF. However, in case the RPF coincides with the natural frequency at a relatively low rotor speed since it is the cage speed times the number of rolling elements. Hence it is implied from the analysis that the number of rolling elements is also an important parameter for vibration analysis of rotor bearing systems and should be considered at the design stage.

2.