ROTORDYNAMIC EXPERIMENTS ON COMPOSITE SHAFTS

Rotordynamic experiments are performed on two hollow tubular Carbon/Ep oxy filament wound composite shafts. The experiments comprise of deter mination of critical speed and unbalance response as well as orbital a nd spectrum analysis. Step-wise progressive balancing near the critica l speed was needed to operate the shaft in the super-critical region. Critical speeds determined from experiments match extremely well with theoretical values obtained from the equivalent modulus beam theory.