Development of Offline Analysis Technique in Determining Counterbalance for Improving Balancing Process of Compressor Turbofan Engine with GUI on Matlab Platform

Abstract

The main cause of failures in rotating machinery is a particularly unbalanced rotor that could occur in many different planes. The Process to correct the unbalance problem in High-Pressure Compressor (HPC) turbofan engine with ordinary balancing machines still without the capability to predict the counterbalances needed. Such machines only determine the unbalance resultants on 2 reference planes, i.e. compressor stage 2 and 9 planes. Therefore, the balancing process takes a long time to accomplished since the determination of the counterbalance weights as well as their locations are done by trial and error based on the operator's experiences. A multiplane balancing analysis calculations were developed on Matlab (Matrix Laboratory) platform to be a supporting additional procedure prior to the counterbalance installation. By using Matlab Graphics User Interface (GUI), this application software becomes user-friendly for the operator who could get the results as the counterbalance positions and their magnitudes as well by input the unbalance resultants from the ordinary balancing machine. This offline auxiliary software was developed to perform balancing analytics calculations in only a few minutes. Moreover, the process is expected to improve the installation time and accuracy as well.