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Heuristics for Balancing Turbine Fans

1 LOG Inc., 1080 Linda Vista Avenue, Mountain View, California 94043
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332
samiouny{at}ilog.com
john.bartholdi{at}isye.gatech.edu
john.vandevate{at}isye.gatech.edu

We develop heuristics for a problem that models the static balancing of turbine fans: load point masses at regularly spaced positions on the periphery of a circle so that the residual unbalance about the center—which corresponds to the axis of rotation of the fan—is as small as possible. We give worst-case guarantees for our heuristics in terms of residual unbalance. For the case of an even number of blades, we show that one of our heuristics provides the same worst-case guarantee (with respect to the ideal of perfect balance) as does total enumeration. Furthermore, computational tests show that our heuristics are orders of magnitude faster and not far from optimum on average.

Subject classifications: Industries, machinery: assembly of turbine engines; Analysis of algorithms, suboptimal: worst-case residual unbalance.
History: Received May 1997; revision received July 1998; revision received January 1999; accepted January 1999.