A rotor system supported by roller beatings displays very complicated nonlinear behaviors due to nonlinear Hertzian contact forces, radial clearances and bearing waviness. This paper presents nonlinear bearing forces of a roller bearing under four-dimensional loads and establishes 4-DOF dynamics equations of a rotor roller bearing system. The methods of Newmark-β and of Newton-Laphson are used to solve the nonlinear equations. The dynamics behaviors of a rigid rotor system are studied through the bifurcation, the Poincar è maps, the spectrum diagrams and the axis orbit of responses of the system. The results show that the system is liable to undergo instability caused by the quasi-periodic bifurcation, the periodic-doubling bifurcation and chaos routes as the rotational speed increases. Clearances, outer race waviness, inner race waviness, roller waviness, damping, radial forces and unbalanced forces-all these bring a significant influence to bear on the system stability. As the clearance increases, the dynamics behaviors become complicated with the number and the scale of instable regions becoming larger. The vibration frequencies induced by the roller bearing waviness and the orders of the waviness might cause severe vibrations. The system is able to eliminate non-periodic vibration by reasonable choice and optimization of the parameters.
