Originally Posted By: PimTac
“Besides the lubricating function, the oil film in the bearing clearances also has a damping function, which contributes to the stability of the shaft and turbine wheel assembly.”
Now I am not a engineer nor that mechanically inclined but I understand the damping effect as another term for stabilizing the bearing/turbo shaft from vibration or that sort. Correct me if I’m wrong here.
Stability/damping, not quite the right terms, it's oil film "stiffness"....here's a (typical) map of what happens with high speed turbomachinery.
Bottom axis is Somerfeld number (r/c)^2 * u * N /P
(r=radius, c= clearance, u is viscosity N is speed, and P is load on projected area).
The 45% lines are the lines that a simple machine would follow speeding up and down.
So for a given machine, an increase in u by (say) 10% would increase So by 10% and possibly push into the unstable region
Although slightly different, you know that sound that small electric motors make when they are on the way out ? - that's instability called "whirl"...in hydrodynamic bearings it's one of the shaft's natural frequencies interacting with the bearing stiffness...
I had one Generator bearing that you could watch the Fourier transform. 30um 1x vibration, and a noisy 1/4 times. Over the course of half an hour, it would be 6, 0, 12, 0, 6, 25, 75, 150. Drop the vicosity, by lowering operating temperature by 5 degrees and the 1/x would settle down again...maybe not come back for days.
Operation in the unstable range isn't automatically high vibration, but it can snap between to states with little provocation.