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On the Inverse Problem of Imbalance

Reconstruction for Aircraft Engines

Article in PAMM March 2002

DOI: 10.1002/1617-7061(200203)1:1<444::AID-PAMM444>3.0.CO;2-7

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444 PAMM, Proc. Appl. Math. Mech. 1 (2002)

Dicken, V.

On the Inverse Problem of Imbalance Reconstruction for Aircraft Engines

A method for identifying the distributed rotor imbalance from aircraft engine vibrations measured on the casing of the
engine is presented. The problem is heavily ill-posed. Nonlinear regularization techniques for linear inverse problems,
nonlinear functionals and adaptive error estimates are suggested for stable reconstruction algorithms.

1. Introduction

In order to improve aircraft passenger comfort as well as safety and lifespan of aeroengines, imbalances in engine
components rotating at high speeds have to be minimized. Due to heat and narrow space direct measurements on
the turbine are impossible. We propose to identify the distributed imbalance or likely causes for an imbalance from
vibration measurements collected on the casing over an idle to maximum speed acceleration of the engine.

2. The Mathematical Model

A validated whole engine FEM model (cf. right fig.) of the aeroengine allows reliable predictions of vibration
amplitude and relative phase at the sensor location on the casing for any given small imbalance load and rotation
speed within a few percent error. For small residual imbalance loads F the vibrational degrees of freedom u of the
system satisfy a linear ODE system (cf. Gasch 1975)

M u00 (t) + Du0 (t) + Su(t) = 2 <(F exp(it)) .

The imbalance load is described by some F C | N . A simple academic rotor model with about 10 possibly out of

balance disks has a few hundred degrees of freedom N , for real engines the ODE dimension N is about 500.000.
If the rotor speed changes only slowly with t steady state conditions may be assumed and the ODE can
be solved algebraically by assuming u(t) = u+ exp(it) + u exp(it). At the sensor position the measurable
acceleration at speed is then given by u00sen (t) = <(g(, F ) exp(it)) for some complex amplitude g(, F ) C.
|

It may be assumed that the possible imbalance cause are actually concentrated in about 20 positions along
the rotation axis where there are high mass concentrations (cf. left fig.).

Figure 1: FEM whole engine model Possible imbalance locations

Solving the above ODE derived from the FEM model for a sampling of the operating frequency range [min , max ]
at some k , k = 1 . . . , K ' 200 and for the loads Fp related to 20 unit imbalances at the relevant positions p
yields a matrix A in C | 20020 with entries A
k,p := g(k , Fp ). Beside by disks with some residual eccentricity a
distributed imbalance may also be caused by swash or run-out in joints between rotor modules. Such imbalances
may approximately be modeled as a superposition of disk eccentricities.
The available data g  are obtained from (possibly multi-valued) informations about current speed, amplitude
and phase extracted from a noisy measurement of the vibration signal u00 (t) with FFT or wavelet techniques by
interpolating amplitude / phase over speed data onto the frequency grid (k )K k=1 [min , max ] (cf. Witte, 2000).
If measurement and data extraction resp. interpolation were without error and the linear whole engine ODE
model
P would perfectly model the considered engine, the data g := (g(k , F )k=1...K for an imbalance cause F =
p p p with coefficients vector f = (fp ) would simply be given by g = A f , i.e. by the superposition gk :=
f F
 Section 15.6 445

P
g(k , F ) = p Ak,p fp . However, we have to consider various errors in modeling, measurement and data processing.
Only noisy data g  = A f + z are available, with some noise term z of which little is known but an estimate
||z||2 ||g||2 with a noise level  [0.01, 0.2].
The matrix A has a singular value decomposition (SVD) A = U V were is diagonal and the ith columns

of the orthogonal matrices U resp. V are eigenvectors of A A resp. AA for the eigenvalue i . Our problem of
recovering f from g  is difficult, because only 3-5 singular values i of A are larger than the expected data noise
level  times 1 . Therefore the inversion of the imbalance to vibration map is a heavily ill posed problem and refined
regularization methods have to be used in order to estimate the imbalance cause f from noisy data g  .

3. Reconstruction Results

Various linear and nonlinear reconstruction methods were tested on phantom data. Linear regularization techniques
like truncated SVD, Landweber and Tikhonov regularization were outperformed by nonlinear regularization tech-
niques (cf. Louis, 1989). We obtained best results with conjugate gradient (CG) regularization. For the problem
at hand also a nonlinear filtered SVD was computed. The nonlinear SVD usually only replicates truncated SVD
results but may yield good reconstruction in special cases were the imbalance energy is concentrated at a higher
order singular vector.
For linear and nonlinear regularization methods Morozovs discrepancy principle may be used to find almost
optimal regularization parameters. Therefore a procedure to adaptively estimate the noise level  of the data from
a single dataset was developed. It is based on the observation that in this application the data dimensions far
exceeds the dimensions to be reconstructed and thus an estimate of the average noise coefficient IE(|hz|vi i|2 ) may
be computed over the exceeding dimensions and extrapolated to the total number of dimension.
Reconstructing a distributed imbalance at realistic noise levels using the adaptive error estimate with CG
controlled by Morozovs principle is feasible when the distribution resembles a low order eigenmode of the rotor
(e.g. a bend of a single wave form on the rotor). Good regularization results in those cases were also obtained using
truncated total least square regularization (cf. Hansen et all, 1997).
For a point imbalance concentrated at only one bladed disk good localization of the imbalance from vibration
data is impossible. Nevertheless it is possible to assign data caused by a point imbalance correctly to one of three
compartments (front, middle, back) of a partition of the rotor. We suggest using nonlinear functionals on a CG
reconstruction of the imbalance obtained from noisy data (cf. [2]) for this task.
Such functionals may prove helpful in reducing maintenance cost for engine overhaul or in identifying likely
problem causes if the quality of new engines in a production line decreases e.g. due to changes in engine production
introduced for cost reduction reasons or due to a change of component suppliers.

Acknowledgements

This research project is founded by the BMBF grant # 03MSM1HB Inverse Bestimmung von Unwuchtverteilungen bei
Flugzeugturbinen and is conducted in a cooperation between the AG Technomathematik (Prof. Dr. Peter Maass), Bremen
and department ED-6 (Dr. Carsten Streller) at Rolls-Royce Deutschland, Dahlewitz.

4. References

1 Dicken, V.; Maass, P.; Reinhardt, F.: Abschliessender technischer Bericht zum BWM Rolls-Royce Projekt: Inverse
Unwuchtbestimmung, Univ. Bremen (1999).
2 Fierro, R.D.; Golub, G.H.; Hansen, P.C.; OLeary, D.P.: Regularization by Truncated Total Least Squares SIAM
J.SCI.COMPUT., Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Vol.18, No.4, (1997), 1223-1241.
3 Gasch, R.; Pfutzner, H.: Rotordynamik, Springer-Verlag, Berlin (1975).
4 Louis, A.K.: Inverse und schlecht gestellte Probleme, Teubner Verlag, Stuttgart (1989).
5 Muehlenfeld K.; Rienaecker A.; Streller C.; Padva L.: Vibration Reduction in AeroEngines - A Case Study
Schwingungen in rotierenden Maschinen V, Referate der Tagung in Wien 26.-28. Februar (2001).
6 Witte, H.: Online-monitoring for aircraft engines - development and application, Aims-Symp. Garmisch-Partenkirchen
(2000).

Dr. Volker Dicken, Zentrum fur Technomathematik, FB 3, Univ. Bremen, PF 330 440, D-28344 Bremen,
Germany, dicken@math.uni-bremen.de

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