Rotating Machinery, such as fans, blowers, centrifuges, motors, generators, flywheels, pump impellers etc generate undesirable vibrations due to the residual centrifugal forces of an imbalanced rotor. These forces act cyclically on bearings and structural elements of the machine, and eventually lead to premature metal fatigue and failure. Also, the vibration consumes considerable energy, acts as a source of noise, and leads to operator fatigue. It is therefore important to control the balance conditions of all rotating equipment.
More and more users are realizing the tremendous economic benefits of having an active vibration control program for rotating machinery. As an example, the Indian Railways is understood to have reduced the out-of-service ratio of locomotives from 18% to less than 1% by mandating balancing of the blowers on the loco. Several companies have confirmed huge reduction in costs of bearing replacements and upto 20% savings in power consumption.
The team of experts at PROTEQ undertake in-situ balancing to provide the above mentioned benefits to all our customers.
BALANCING PROCEDURE:
All portable balancers work on the principle of measurement of vibration as a vector, a quantity having a magnitude and an angle. The vibration is the effect of imbalance, which is an unknown vector. Thus the procedure involves placing a known trial weight at an arbitrary location on the rotor, thus changing the vibration vector. From the resulting vector, the unit computes the amount of imbalance in the rotor, and provides the amount of weight required (as a fraction of the trial weight) and its angular location on the rotor (from the trial weight location) for countering the initial imbalance of the rotor.
In some cases the rotor consists of discrete blades or vanes, in which case the correction needs to be resolved to the adjoining blades, such that the resultant is equal to the required correction. The unit does this calculation automatically.
