28

Rotor Balancing

All rotors, particularly those intended to operate at high rotational speed,

must be balanced before starting their service life and sometimes balancing
procedures must be repeated from time to time. Balancing is the subject of
standards and is dealt with in a wide literature.

28.1 General considerations

The designer must take into account balancing requirements and provide
the possibility of removing or adding masses in proper locations since the
early design stages. Balancing must be regarded as one of the construction
stages, to be performed after assembling the whole rotor or before, on its
components, if they must be balanced separately (which usually does not
avoid a further balancing process on the assembly), and balancing toler-
ances must be stated in a way that is not conceptually different from what
is done for other types of tolerances, dimensional or geometrical.
The balance conditions of a rotor can change in time, and periodic rebal-
ancing may be needed. In some cases it is not just the case of a slow change
of balancing conditions in time, but of continuous variations occurring as
consequence of operating and environmental conditions, wear and aging.
This phenomenon can be quite severe and is usually referred to as wan-
dering unbalance; it can be caused by thermal deformations of the rotor,
material inhomogeneity, cracks, loose tolerances in built-up rotors, and the
like.
734 28. Rotor Balancing

Some rotors must be balanced several times during the first runs at
subsequent higher speeds, in order to reach good balancing conditions at
operating speed and running temperature. Even if the rotor is correctly
balanced in operating conditions, poor balance may be encountered during
start-up, until steady-state conditions are reached.
Rotor balancing has been the object of standards and designers must
refer to them in stating balancing tolerance at the design stage. Standards
are stated for the various types of machines, but it is the duty of the de-
signer to verify that the stresses and deformations caused by the maximum
residual unbalance prescribed are not beyond allowable limits. He must
also be sure that the prescribed balancing tolerances are strict enough to
prevent the rotor from being a source of unwanted vibration and noise for
the surrounding environment. As with all tolerances, it must be remem-
bered that it is impossible to reach a perfect balancing and that it is not
necessary, and generally not advisable (at least from the economical point
of view), to impose too-strict balancing requirements.
From the point of view of balancing, rotors are usually divided into two
categories: rigid and deformable rotors. This subdivision, which is accepted
by ISO standards, is in a certain way arbitrary, because no rigid body exists
in the real world. A rotor can belong to either class, depending on the speed
at which it is supposed to operate and, in particular, a speed at which any
rigid rotor ceases to behave as such always exists. The balancing of rigid and
deformable rotors will be only briefly summarized in the following sections:
The reader can find all the required details in specialized monographs, in
particular, those published by firms that build balancing machines.1

28.2 Rigid rotors

Following the ISO 1925 standard, a rotor can be considered rigid if it can
be balanced by adding or removing mass in two arbitrarily chosen planes
perpendicular to the rotation axis and if its balance conditions are practi-
cally independent from speed up to the maximum allowable speed. If this
condition is satisfied, the rotor can be assimilated to a rigid body.
If the inertia of the stator is neglected and its elastic properties, referred
to the center of mass of the rotor, are summarized in the stiffness and
damping matrices K and Cr , a model with four real degrees of freedom
(two complex ones) is adequate to study its flexural dynamic behavior
(See Section 24.1.1). The balance conditions of the machine can then be
summarized by two parameters: the eccentricity (or the static unbalance
m ) and angle χ between the principal axis of inertia of the rotor and the
rotation axis (or the couple unbalance (Jp − Jt )χ).

1 As an example, see H. Schneider, Balancing technology, Schenck, Darmstadt, 1974.