The PINN approach described in the previous Section is here applied on a numerical case study of a rotating shaft system in which the dynamics is simulated with the use of an extended Jeffcott rotor model [
33]. The system, illustrated in
Figure 2, consists of a
long rotating shaft (i.e.,
) made of aluminium (Young’s modulus
set to
, and density
equal to
) and supported at both ends. It has a circular cross section with a diameter of
, and it incorporates a disk (representing, for instance, a flywheel, fan, turbine, gear, etc.) that is mounted at distances
and
from the respective supports. The shaft rotates at a velocity
, in which
denotes the angle defined with respect to the
axis of the right-handed
reference frame which is fixed in space. In this reference frame, the disk lies within the
plane, and the
axis is aligned with the line connecting the two supports. Without any loss of generality, the disk is here considered to be positioned at the midpoint of the shaft, i.e.,
. Moreover, the disk centre of mass
is displaced from the axis of rotation, whose trace in the disk plane is identified with the point
, generating a static unbalance defined by the distance
and the angle
. This unbalance causes the point
to displace from the line joining the supports leading the shaft to whirl around it.
The numerical model used to compute the rotor dynamics consists of a system of two second-order ODEs with a state vector of two components (making reference to
Section 2,
and
, respectively), as reported in Eq. (6) and Eq. (7):
where
and
denote the
and
coordinates of the point
, respectively, and represent the components of the state vector (i.e.,
);
and
are the equivalent viscous damping terms of the stationary and rotating parts of the system, respectively;
represents the summation of the disk mass
and the shaft equivalent mass at the disk location
;
indicates the gravity acceleration;
and
are the system stiffnesses along the
and
axes, respectively, that are assumed to coincide with the axes of the ellipse of elasticity, i.e., the principal axes of elasticity of the supporting structure. Notably, the rotating damping
is here considered to be coincident to the contribution given by the shaft material properties, thus neglecting any potential additional term, and it is computed exploiting the approximation of a linear system [
33], i.e.,
. Here,
denotes the rotational damping coefficient, that is assumed to be
,
represents the mass of the shaft, while
denotes the shaft flexural stiffness, with
indicating the moment of inertia of the shaft cross section. The disk mass
is considered to be equal to
, while the shaft equivalent mass at the disk location
is computed as
, in which
denotes the static displacement of the shaft at the disk location due to the shaft weight. The stiffnesses
and
are the combination of the shaft stiffness
and those of the supports
and
along the
and
axes, respectively. That is,
and
. However, determining the stiffness values of the supports can be challenging for different reasons, e.g., when they have complex geometries and interactions, due to misalignments or imperfections in installation, when the support materials is not well-defined or uniform, and they can change due to degradation over time [
34]. A similar reasoning applies for the non-rotating damping and for the static unbalance. Hence, in this work
,
,
,
and
represent the components of the parameter vector
, and their values are estimated through a PINN. Such parameters are selected because tracking their value is essential for maintaining the performance, reliability, and safety of rotating machinery.