Stability analysis of nonlinear synchronous vibration in an inclined rotor system supported by journal bearing with variational gravity

• Extended analytical method predicts synchronous vibration stability. • Extension of conventional eigenvalue analysis for orbital stability. • Two critical inclination angles are found in an inclined rotor system with gravity variations. • Efficient threshold calculation for rotor systems in arbitrarily inclined configurations. In vertical rotating shaft-bearing systems, synchronous vibration undergoes destabilization and stabilization owing to the self-excited vibration. Recently, these phenomena have been clarified numerically, experimentally, and analytically based on a newly proposed analytical method. In this method, a two-step linearization of the nonlinear journal bearing (JB) force and generalized eigenvalue analysis are proposed to directly determine the stability of the synchronous orbit. However, this method cannot be used directly for inclined-rotor systems with a large gravitational effect. Moreover, stability changes caused by gravity variations in inclined-rotor systems have not been fully investigated. This study extended the analytical method to one with weighted average dynamic coefficients to efficiently predict the stability changes of synchronous whirling vibrations in inclined rotor systems. The extended analytical method clearly clarifies gravity-induced stability changes in comparison with the numerical (shooting) method. Our analytical method enhances the ability of rotor dynamics software to calculate the stability thresholds of inclined rotor systems with gravity variations.