Control system preventing thermal gradient development on foils of foil bearing

Abstract

This article presents attempts at automating a control system to reduce temperature scatter on the foil of a foil bearing. The control system reads the temperatures at six circumferential locations of the bearing’s foil and distributes control currents to the thermoelectric modules integrated into the bearing’s bushing. Three basic approaches have been proposed and tested: 1) a simple hot-spot tracking algorithm assigning predefined current values to the modules closest to the hot-spot location; 2) a tracking algorithm reducing abrupt changes in the control currents and, in effect, the local heat flux distribution; and 3) a tracking algorithm enhanced with a PID controller. The proposed controller has been implemented and compared to the performance of a temperature controller that does not have tracking capabilities. The implemented control strategies have proven the feasibility of temperature scatter reduction inside the investigated bearing. In most test cases, the instantaneous gradient reduction exceeded 50% (reaching 63% at its best).