This paper investigates on developing a novel model-based identification technique for the simultaneous identification of severe faults such as the unbalance in the rotor and transverse crack in the shaft supported on foil bearings. With plenty of advantages over rolling element bearings or fluid film bearings, foil bearings have been used as the supported bearings in rotating machines such as fuel cell-electric air compressors, blowers, expanders, air cycle machines, etc. In the present article, a rotor model consisting of a cracked and unbalanced rotor with a disc in the middle supported by foil bearings has been considered for easier understanding of online identification of faults in high-speed rotating machines. Dynamic equations of motion of the rotor-foil bearing system have been derived based on the equivalent stiffness concept of shaft-foil bearing, inertia force, unbalance force, and crack force relying on the switching crack concept. The solutions of the equations, i.e., time domain displacement responses, orbit plots, etc. have been obtained numerically using the Simulink inbuilt Runge-Kutta method for different values of spin speed of the rotor and ramp-up speeds. The shaft centreline orbit is found to have eight shaped and asymmetric about the axes due to presence of crack and unbalance faults. The force due to unbalance fault gets dominated over the crack force at the higher speeds. Moreover, the orbit line is also observed to be thicker at higher level of noise addition in the responses. As the switching crack force contains multiple harmonics, a full spectrum analysis has been done to investigate both the forward and backward rotor whirls. The frequency-based rotor displacement is utilized to illustrate an identification algorithm for the estimation of the dynamic coefficients of foil bearings, additive crack stiffness, and magnitude as well as phase of disc unbalance. The identification algorithm is found to be quite suitable for the estimation of system and faults parameters even with addition of different levels of noise signal and modelling errors.

Many gas companies build and operate gas distribution system in the city country and around the world. The traditional open-cut excavation requires the ground to be broken up by heavy equipment, the soil and asphalt need to be removed. Traditionally, a technician requires a minimum of 60 cm by 180 cm excavation to perform routine procedures. Often the trench must be temporarily supported using some type of shoring before a utility worker can enter the hole to perform the repairs to the utility pipe. This process is costly, time consuming, dangerous and is inconvenient to traffic patterns. We propose a new solution called keyhole technology which minimizes labor and restoration costs compared with conventional practices. In our design, the same construction and maintenance procedures can be accomplished through a 45 cm diameter circular holes above the utility pipe to be repaired. However, specially designed, long handled tools that operate remotely are necessary. This process is more cost-efficient, less dangerous and less disruptive to traffic patterns because there is no additional milling and overlaying of the road. The small hole requires little replacement materials to fill the hole. Because the concept is relatively new to the public utility sector, there is a lack of equipment/tools available that could perform the required services. The finite element analyses using commercial package Abaqus will be employed to obtain the force needed to close the pipe. As a final example, we will show the topology optimization of squeeze–off tool as the act of an iterative process. The correctness of the numerical calculations was verified by a pipe compression experiment on Instron 8850 testing machine.