Field Balancing with Gary James

There are a lot of aspects that need to be taken care of in condition monitoring and field balancing is one of those. There are two types of balancing; static and dynamic. The first one deals with balancing in a controlled environment and other one is purely balancing a piece of equipment in the field. When you have balanced an asset against a bunch if parameters, you know when there’s an unbalance in the equipment. There are different defects that can caught using a balancing frequency or other parameter. There are a lot of causes for unbalancing such as; corrosion, part damage, assembly error, and other machining tolerances.

The equipment that we need in the field include; a balancing tool—whether it’s traditional of some modern device—that should do the job to balance the machine. When you are evaluating a machine, you can run different analysis to know what needs to done to fix that unbalance in the machine. The standard procedure could be something starting with calculating the amplitude of the damage, then you can come up with a correction weight that can be attached to the piece of the equipment to balance the machine. You can try this method till you get the results.

There are some standard specification provided by ISO based on rotor weight and rpm of the machine. These provide general guidelines to check the balance of the machine but you can decide the specifications based on the evaluation of the rotor. When you are in the field, removing weight is quite hard. It is very difficult to determine the exact weight you have taken out. Adding weight and keeping track of it is easy, comparatively. Any person looking to start in the field balancing can start with learning about graphic balancing and studying the tools.

Going with a proper alignment and field balancing course would be the best choice where you can learn to understand the problem, get to know the right tools, and learn from understanding the graphical examples. Customers always want to know the type of weights that you have used, their position, and how they are balancing the machine, so you should have that information with you in the field. The technicians should know the resonance against different frequencies so that they can capture the right data and make decisions based on that to fix the issue right away.

An equipment doesn’t always need weight to balance it. Sometimes cleaning a dirty piece of equipment goes a long way. You have to make sure that the equipment is clean before you go about balancing the machine. You have to pay attention to your machine data, see what it is telling you, and then make an informed choice to eliminate the defects. You have to start with laying the ground work first, like checking for soft-foot or rust that can throw off your readings. The best way to get it done is let the programmers and providers work together to make necessary enhancement towards better field balancing.

Eruditio Links:

• Eruditio
• HP Reliability
• James Kovacevic’s LinkedIn
• Reliability Report

Gary James Links:

• Ludeca
• Ludeca Field Balancing
• Gary James LinkedIn
• Ludeca LinkedIn
• Ludeca Field Balancing Procedure
• Book: Practical Vibration Primer by Charlie Jackson
• Technical Associates – Charlotte
• VIInstruments.org

152- Field Balancing with Gary JamesJames Kovacevic

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