A Theoretical and Experimental Investigation of a Gas Operated Bearing Damper for Turbomachinery: Part II — Experimental Results and Comparison With Theory

This is the second of two papers describing results of a research project directed at developing a gas operated vibration damper for high temperature turbomachinery applications. This part presents the experimental measurements made on three variations of the gas damper hardware and compares them with the theoretical predictions presented in Part I. It is found that the isentropic theoretical model predicts the damper characteristics quite well. A maximum damping of 13.2 Ib-s/in was measured for a single actuator at a natural frequency of 100 hz using the present design and the results suggest that significantly higher damping levels are possible with design modifications.