Abstract: A method to calculate the response of rotor-bearing system to seismic excitation is presented. A finite rotor element based on Galerkin formulation is proposed to model the rotor, Newmark integration method is used to obtain the rotor response. The method is proved by experiment. An example problem of a generator rotor-bearing system is solved using Elcentro earthquake data.

Key words: Finite element, Response, Rotor-bearing system, Seismic excitation