264 D.-Q. Cao et al.
of bearing alignment changes during system operation. Based on the approach
proposed in [1, 2], procedures for balancing large multi-bearing rotors have been
established in [3]. Hu et al. [4] designed a test rotor supported on four bearing to val-
idate that the vibration behaviors of statically indeterminate rotor-bearing systems
with hydrodynamic journal bearings are significantly dependent on the relative lat-
eral alignment of bearing housing. The study of Ding and Leung [5] indicated that
the non-synchronous whirls of two flexibly coupled shafts may affect each other. Fi-
nite element method (FEM) and computer simulation technology have been widely
used in designing and analyzing rotor-bearing systems. And in the machine struc-
ture analysis, a refine discretization is usually necessary to obtain a reliable dynamic
model. In this process, a large set of second order differential equations of motion
for the multi-bearing system is established. Additionally, when one or more nonlin-
ear elements such as fluid-bearing, fluid seal, etc., are included in the system, which
is often case, the large order nonlinear systems are usually costly to solve in terms of
computer time and storage, especially over long-time intervals. Hence, it is essential
to reduce the order of the large-scale nonlinear dynamic system, and subsequently
to get a lower order dynamic system which is an approximate representative of the
original one.
The traditional order reduction methods, such as the Guyan order reduction
method [6] and standard Galerkin method (SGM) may also be applied to nonlin-
ear dynamic systems. Although the traditional order reduction methods proved to
be efficient in constructing approximate solutions for nonlinear dynamic systems, it
has itself own limitation that accurate results may only be achieved through the in-
clusion of many modes in the reduced order system. If only a few nonlinear elements
exist, the large order system can be reduced using a fixed-interface component mode
synthesis procedure (CMS) [7] in which the degrees of freedom (DOF) associated
with nonlinear elements are retained in the physical coordinates while the linear
subsystem, the DOF of which far exceeds the DOF of the nonlinear subsystem, are
truncated to a few dominant modes. However, if there are complex nonlinear terms
in the system, i.e., the DOF of the nonlinear subsystem is not small enough, the
practicability of fixed-interface CMS is worth of further study.
An ideally order reduction method is sought to provide a reduced order model
that only contains a few modes. In pursuit of the goal, a large dynamical system
is transformed to modal coordinates and split into a master subsystem and a slave
subsystem. Then the nonlinear Galerkin method (NLGM) is developed, in which
a lower order subsystem is constructed by estimating and approximating the slave
subsystem as function of the master subsystem. The approximate relation between
the master subsystem and slave subsystem was given the name of approximate iner-
tial manifolds (AIM) [8–11]. One simple method for constructing the AIM has been
proposed in [11] by ignoring the time derivative term of the slave subsystem. The
AIM can be obtained by iteration. In particular, during numerically integrating the
reduced order system obtained via NLGM, constructing the AIM at each time step is
tedious and very costly. In order to avoid the disadvantage of the NLGM and at the
meantime to improve SGM, Garcia-Archilla et al. [12] proposed a so-called post-
processed Galerkin method (PPGM). The PPGM, which is as simple as the SGM