Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to present an approach for replacing the effects of each rigid disk mounted on the spin shaft by a lumped mass together with a frequency-dependent equivalent mass moment of inertia so that the whirling motion of a rotating shaft-disk system is similar to the transverse free vibration of a stationary beam and the technique for the free vibration analysis of a stationary beam with multiple concentrated elements can be used to determine the forward and backward whirling speeds, along with mode shapes of a distributed-mass shaft carrying arbitrary rigid disks. Numerical results reveal that the characteristics of whirling motions are significantly dependent on the slopes of the associated natural mode shapes at the positions where the rigid disks are located. Furthermore, the results obtained from the presented analytical method and those obtained from existing literature or the finite element method (FEM) are in good agreement.