Since increasing demands for high efficiency of high speed rotating machines in recent years, the clearance between rotor and stator becomes smaller and smaller. Consequently, rub-impact fault is more likely to occur. It has become one of the most common and serious malfunctions for rotor system in practical engineering. Because the rub-impact severely induces the rotor dynamic instability, it will finally result in catastrophic failures and great economic loss if undetected in time. The occurrence of the rub-impact leads to a contact force between rotating shaft and stator which can be regarded as an additional support on the rotor system. The contact force will further result in the stiffening effect. As a result, some fast time-varying phenomena of vibration responses including the fast time-varying transient stiffness and the fast oscillated instantaneous frequency (IF) may appear. These phenomena may offer abundant characteristics to diagnose the rub-impact fault of rotor system. In this paper, an effective method based on the fast oscillated characteristics of IF for vibration responses is proposed to detect rub-impact fault of rotor bearing system. First of all, the fast time-varying transient stiffness of rub-impact rotor system is qualitatively formulated based on the Jeffcott rotor model and the fast oscillated characteristics of IF is presented and theoretically analyzed. Second, a time-frequency technique called nonlinear squeezing time-frequency transform (NSTFT) is introduced to extract the fast oscillated IF resulting from the rub-impact fault of rotor systems. Numerical simulations are respectively conducted on the Jeffcott rotor system with linear stiffness and oil film bearings. And then the oscillated characteristics of the IF are analyzed. The analysis results suggest that the IF of the vibration responses remains constant at the rotating frequency if there is no rub-impact fault. However, if rub-impact fault occurs, the IF of the vibration responses will oscillate periodically around the basic harmonic frequency. Furthermore, the oscillation law of the IF of vibration responses for rub-impact rotor systems is also numerically investigated. It is found that the oscillation frequency is the 1/k (k = 1,2,3, ...) of the rotating frequency if the rotor system operates at periodic-k motion. Finally, rub-impact fault experiments are performed under different operating regimes. The experimental results are consistent with the numerical results, thus demonstrating the validity and the practicability of the proposed method.
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