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Richard W. Armentrout, Ph.D., P.E.

Dr. Richard (Rich) Armentrout has over 25 years experience in the design and development of rotor-bearing systems for the aircraft, manufacturing, petrochemical, and power generation industries.  He has held positions at Ford Motor Company, Westinghouse, McDonnell Douglas, KMC, and Centritech.

Rich's primary focus has been the development of rotor, bearing, and damper designs to lower vibrations in turbomachinery by separating critical speeds from running speeds, improving system damping, and increasing rotordynamic stability.  While at Centritech in 1988, Rich developed a reduced-diameter shaft design for overhung blowers to help reduce the super-resonant bearing loads by increasing shaft flexibility. This modification has since been applied very successfully to a number of other similar machines in the field.  In 1991, Rich led the initial development of the Flexure-Pivot^TM tilting pad bearing at KMC Division of Cookson America, showing that a one-piece bearing having a sufficiently flexible support web can yield rotordynamic stability similar to that of a standard tilting pad bearing.   Recently, he has worked with the aircraft industry in developing a methodology for integrating rotor models with large-scale finite element casing models to yield complete structural dynamic representations of jet aircraft engines including bearing and damper nonlinearities.

Rich has authored a number of technical publications covering rotordynamics, modal analysis, structural dynamics, and vibration isolation.