Rotor Balancing Practitioner

A precision-balanced rotor reduces the centrifugal forces on the shafts, bearings, and the supporting structure.

Unbalance sucks the life out of rotating machinery, greatly increasing the likelihood of premature failure. In addition, unbalance can result in structural failure, poor product quality, and noise that disturbs workers and neighbors of the plant site.

It is all too common for rotor balance to be overlooked. It is also common for rotors to be balanced without achieving precision tolerances.

The root cause of these problems is the training provided to the practitioner performing the balance job. While vibration analysis courses that follow the ISO 18436-2 standard will provide a detailed overview of rotor balancing, that is not enough for a person to be adequately skilled to achieve the highest levels of precision. As a result, in many cases, the person performing the balance job simply follows the steps on their vibration analyzer without truly understanding what they are doing. And if the balance job becomes complicated, or they are not reducing the vibration to the desired level, they are unsure of what to do.

If you wish to achieve higher levels of reliability and performance improvement, this practice must end. You must operate machines with precision balanced rotors.

The Mobius Institute rotor balancing practitioner training course provides detailed training on how to correctly identify and verify unbalance, how to choose the correct balancing technique, how to select trial weights, how to measure vibration, how to utilize balance standards, and ultimately, how to achieve precision balance with rigid rotors.

The course can be delivered at your site, but the most common way to master precision alignment is via the iLearnBalancing™ e-learning course that is included within the iLearnReliability™ Learning Management System or the On-demand learning center. The self-paced e-learning training is filled with animations and simulations to make it easier to learn, more understandable, and more interesting.

Course Agenda

The course is designed to establish the fundamentals and then cover each of the common balancing techniques.

• Introduction
• What is unbalance
  • What causes machines to be out of balance
• Understanding phase
  • Phase conventions
  • Advanced phase
  • Understanding vectors

• Balancing theory
  • Different types of unbalance

• Diagnosing unbalance
  • Confusing unbalance with other fault conditions

• Preparing for the balance job
• Single plane balancing
  • Single plane vector balancing

• Two plane balancing
  • Static-couple balancing

• Balancing overhung rotors
• Four run no phase balancing
• Trial weight selection
• Splitting and combining weights
• What can go wrong – and how to recover
• Tolerances and quality and the ISO standards
• Tolerances and quality and the API MIL standards
• Conclusion