Improvement of the vibration diagnostics of rotation shaft damage based on fractal analysis

This work is devoted to further research and improvement of the vibration diagnostics of the initial crack-like damage of rotation shaft in aviation gas-turbine engines (GTE). We propose to use fractal analysis of the accelerating shaft response in order to increase the damage detection efficiency. Responses of the accelerating shaft are derived by using simulation in absence and in presence of the initial traverse crack. The responses of the cracked shaft have sub-critical peaks; the increase in size of a crack leads to the increase in peak values of the vibration amplitude in the range of sub-harmonic resonances. The Hurst exponent is obtained for the time series in the range of sub-harmonic resonances. The research shows that a small change in the crack size results in considerable change of the Hurst exponent, which allows to detect the mentioned sub-harmonic resonances of the measured signal in order to identify the initial crack-like damage of the rotation shaft.