Heuristic algorithms for a turbine-blade-balancing problem

Abstract

In the turbine-blade manufacturing industry, turbine-blades are machined and then are assembled to form a cylindrical roll of blades. The roll of blades should be balanced as much as possible, since otherwise the efficiency of the turbine generator might degrade. The turbine-blade balancing problem is known to be NP-hard, thus finding an optimal solution is likely to be computationally intractable for large problems. Several heuristic methods for turbine-blade balancing appeared in the literature. We propose heuristic methods for balancing blades based on the number partitioning algorithm. The proposed methods outperformed existing methods remarkably in terms of the accuracy with a negligible increase in the running time. Scope and purpose Turbine-blade balancing is an important task in turbine-blade manufacturing and in the regular overhaul of a turbine. Manual balancing is very time consuming and tedious, and often sophisticated machines are used on the shop floor for balancing blades. Exact solution procedures for solving the turbine-blade balancing problem would not be appropriate, since an enormous amount of computer time would be required. However, balancing blades has to be solved in real time on the shop floor. Therefore heuristic procedures that can solve the balancing problem with reasonable computational effort are desirable. In this paper, we propose several heuristic methods for balancing blades.