A transverse crack in a rotating shaft is dangerous from the point of view of safe and uninterrupted operation. Many catastrophic failures have occurred in the past on large power plant rotors. Most of the work on the behaviour and response of the cracked rotor has been focussed on the rotor with a constant depth crack. In this paper lateral vibration response of a cracked Jeffcott rotor is analysed during an unstable propagation of a transverse surface crack. The objective of the investigation is to understand if the rotor exhibits any discernible vibration response characteristics when an unstable propagation of the existing crack takes place. It has been observed that for the supercritical operation of the cracked rotor, the rapid unstable propagation of the crack does not show any tangible evidence of the unstable propagation. However, for the subcritical operation the rupture is preceded by unstable growth of the vibration level.
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