Imbalance detection for industrial problems
R. Ramlau (Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics, Linz, Austria)
A major problem of rotating machinery is the detection of imbalances. Imbalances can lead to an insecure operation and an early abrasion or even to the destruction of the engine. Therefore, possible imbalance distributions have to be detected early enough in order to correct them as good as possible by the placement of balancing weights. The talk focuses on the identification imbalances from vibrational measurements in rotating machinery and it application to industrial problems. Since it is an ill posed inverse problem the reconstruction is based on regularization techniques. To handle the direct problem of computing vibrations for given imbalances a model of the rotor under consideration has to be provided. This can be either an experimental model or an mathematical one. The latter is based on a Finite Element discretizaion of the PDE that describes the displacement of a system for given external loads. The resulting ODE can be solved easily. We have employed the imbalance reconstruction principle to several industrial applications of linear and nonlinear nature as generators, vacuum pumps, aircraft engines, wind power plants, and high precision cutting machines.