Dynamic Rotor Deformation and Vibration Monitoring Using a Non-Incremental Laser Doppler Distance Sensor

Monitoring rotor deformations and vibrations dynamically is an important task for improving the safety and the lifetime as well as the energy efficiency of motors and turbo machines. However, due to the high rotor speed encountered in particular at turbo machines, this requires concurrently a high measurement rate and high accuracy, which can not be fulfilled by most commercially available sensors. To solve this problem, we developed a non-incremental laser Doppler distance sensor (LDDS), which is able to measure simultaneously the in-plane velocity and the out-of-plane position of moving rough solid objects with micrometer precision. In addition, this sensor concurrently offers a high temporal resolution in the microsecond range, because its position uncertainty is in principle independent of the object velocity in contrast to conventional distance sensors, which is a unique feature of the LDDS. Consequently, this novel sensor enables precise and dynamic in-process deformation and vibration measurements on rotating objects, such as turbo machine rotors, even at very high speed. In order to evidence the capability of the LDDS, measurements of rotor deformations (radial expansion), vibrations and wobbling motions are presented at up to 50,000 rpm rotor speed.