Wear parameters identification of hydrodynamic bearing based on operational modal analysis and on-rotor sensing technology

Abrasive wear is a predominant fault in hydrodynamic bearings that can deteriorate bearing performance and damage the rotating machine eventually. The present work proposes a novel wear parameters identification method for hydrodynamic bearings based on operational modal analysis (OMA) and on-rotor sensing (ORS) technology. With this framework, the objective function is defined as the sum of squared errors between the theoretical modal frequencies and the identified modal frequencies. For the experiment verification, the ORS technology is used to collect rotor vibration directly. Additionally, the cepstrum editing procedure (CEP) is applied to enhance modal information. The different wear parameters are successfully identified using combined stochastic subspace identification (SSI) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms in both simulation and experimental signals. •A novel framework of wear parameters identification based on operational modal analysis (OMA) is proposed.•The variation tendency of bearing performance and modal frequencies under different wear conditions are clarified.•The advantages of rotor acceleration signals collected by on-rotor sensing (ORS) are expounded.•The rationality and correctness of the proposed method have been verified.