What Is A Balanced Fan?
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Balancing your fan wheel on its own isn’t enough: to stay below the vibration limits required, you must also balance the entire fan assembly after the wheel and drive components have been installed.
In this brief video, AirPro Sales Manager / Senior Application Engineer Chet White details the two critical stages required to ensure a well-balanced fan.
Full Transcript:
A well-balanced fan can lead to a fan that has a long life, which I think most of you out there would like to see with your centrifugal fans.
So, what is a balanced fan? Well, in AirPro’s factory, we have two stages of balance. And the first stage is an ISO dynamic balance, where we’re going to take the wheel and balance the wheel by itself. No in that phase (you can go back and watch the video that we’ve done specifically on this type of balance) but we’re taking the wheel, we’re suspending it between a center-hung shaft, and we are dynamically balancing this wheel at about one-sixth of the full operating speed of the fan. Now this is just again the wheel by itself on a balance shaft reading out through a machine. Now after this process, where we balance this wheel, we send it to step two.
Step two is the complete fan. So let’s say in this case we have a pedestal, we have bearings, we’ve got a housing, and we’ve got the wheel that we balanced by itself in step one and now we’re looking at step two. A balanced fan is when a fan is completely installed and it’s below the vibration limits required to operate a fan for a long time. And so you can balance it real well in step one and still need to do a little work in step two. In step two what we’re looking at is a vertical, a horizontal (which is directly at the side of the bearing that we’re looking at right here - that’s horizontal), and then an axial, this way. So we’re looking at three phases, and we’re making sure that it is balanced to within limits in those three phases. And when we have it balanced within those limits, we consider this to be a balanced fan.
No why isn’t this [pointing to the first stage image] good enough? When I worked in the balance department, there would be times we’d balance a fan like this. We’d hang 150 grams on one side, 120 grams on the other side, and we might get that thing knocked down to where it was balanced to within like .25 grams on each side for like 150-pound wheel. Now that felt pretty balanced at that time, but when you put the whole system together, sometimes there are variabilities with how the whole fan comes together, to where even a really balanced wheel, you run it over here and you’re still over the vibration level you need to be at.
So once you’re over here, usually the balance is not nearly as severe as what you have to do over here, but you’ll still have to do some tweaks to the wheel. You grind a little weight off, you weld a little weight on, maybe you have to add stiffness in your system to get your fan down to the balance levels it needs to be at, but that’s why we consider this to be a balanced fan when you’re within the vibration limits of the complete assembled unit.
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