DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF MITCHELL TILTING PAD APPARATUS

📄 Project Abstract

The Mitchell tilting pad apparatus is a hydrodynamic measuring instrument developed in the early 1880's in the laboratory of Beauchamp Tower in England. Tower was employed to study the friction in railway journal bearings and come up with the best method of lubricating them. The Mitchell tilting pad apparatus is used broadly in two different experiments namely; 1) Determination of the load carrying capacity of the slider bearing. 2) Confirming the theory of the hydrodynamic lubrication. Tilting pad journal bearings are a source of both static support and dynamic stiffness and damping. Tilting pad journal bearings have a number of pads, typically four or five. Each pad in the bearing is free to rotate about a pivot and cannot support a moment. As a result, the destabilizing forces are greatly reduced or eliminated, and the bearings are no longer a potential source of rotordynamic instability. This feature has made tilting pad journal bearings the standard fluid-film bearing for most high-speed applications. High-speed rotordynamic applications often have rotors that pass through one or two bending critical speeds as the machines are accelerated to the operating speed. The damping from the fluid film bearings is required to safely pass through these bending critical speeds as the rotating element is accelerated. The damping also helps suppress potentially destabilizing forces from sources such as radial seals, balance pistons, impeller eye seals, internal friction fits, and unbalanced electromagnetic forces.