Suppression of Persistent Rotor Vibrations Using Adaptive Techniques

Abstract

Recent work in the area of adaptive control has seen the development of techniques for the adaptive rejection of persistent disturbances for structural systems. They have been implemented and tested for large-scale structural systems, with promising results, but have not been widely applied to smaller-scale systems and devices. Rotor systems are subject to a variety of persistent disturbances (for example, due to mass imbalance, blade-pass effects) that occur at the rotor running speed or multiples of the running speed. The frequencies of such disturbance forces are generally known, but their magnitudes tend to vary over time. Adaptive techniques to counter the effects of such disturbances would appear to be a promising strategy in this regard. In order to assess the effectiveness of adaptive disturbance rejection for rotor applications and identify issues associated with implementation, an adaptive disturbance rejection control is developed, implemented, and tested for a magnetic-bearing-supported rotor system. Some conclusions and insights concerning the application of this method to rotor system vibration suppression are presented and discussed.