Investigation on the subsynchronous pseudo-vibration of rotating machinery

Subsynchronous pseudo-vibration (SPV) of rotating machinery is one of the primary reasons for fault misdiagnosis. SPV has similar signal signatures to those of a real fault, which usually leads to excessive maintenance or even unscheduled shutdown. For this reason, it is essential to investigate the root causes of SPV so as to reduce unnecessary downtime and maintenance cost. Aiming at this issue, a novel signal model for rotor non-contact vibration is built to describe the generating mechanism of one kind of SPV by considering the combined effects of rotor axial motion and detection surface runout on vibration signal. To obtain more discriminative fault features from the vibration signals, the two-dimension holospectrum (2DH) is employed to integrate the phase information from two perpendicularly installed sensors. The characteristics of precession orbit used to describe the lateral motion of a rotor could be fully extracted by 2DH. It is shown that the precession orbit at the fault feature frequency will degenerate into a straight line when SPV occurs, and thus the eccentricity of precession orbit could be considered as a key feature for discriminating SPV from real subsynchronous vibration (RSV). The effectiveness of proposed method was validated on a rotor test rig. By using this method, the SPV problem of a real gearbox in a blast furnace blower set in a steel mill was successfully diagnosed.