Vertical Transient Response Analysis of a Cracked Jeffcott Rotor Based on Improved Empirical Mode Decomposition

The crack-induced changes in the vertical transient response of a rotating shaft–disc system, Jeffcott rotor, are investigated for transverse crack detection. The crack is considered as a breathing crack. A novel breathing function is proposed, in which the partially open–closed crack breathing behavior is interpolated between the fully open and closed crack behaviors. The breathing crack excites superharmonic response components of the transient as well as the subharmonic components. A Hilbert–Huang transform based on an improved empirical mode decomposition algorithm is subsequently formulated to evaluate the time–frequency representation of the vertical transient response of the rotor to detect the crack. The results show that the proposed breathing function can effectively reduce the computational effort without sacrificing the accuracy of the crack breathing behavior in the presence of small cracks. It is shown that time–frequency representations based on an improved empirical mode decomposition algorithm can lead to the detection of smaller cracks compared with those based on the empirical mode decomposition algorithm.