How do I balance a shaft?

“How do I balance a shaft?” seems like a fairly straightforward question, but there are a number of things that we need to understand first. Here we look at a number of key concepts that need to be understood in order perform balancing.

What does balance mean?

Well broadly speaking to balance a shaft, mass must be added or removed at certain angles. The concept being that the centre of gravity and rotational centre of the shaft will be equal when the shaft is balanced. (more…)

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Vibration Monitoring Phase Measurement And The Tacho Signal

Any vibration signal may be analyzed into amplitude and phase as a function of frequency. The phase represents fifty percent of the information so it is most important to measure phase for vibration monitoring. Most vibrations on a rotating machine are related to the rotational speed so it is clearly important to have a measure of the speed, either directly or as a once per revolution tacho pulse. A question sometimes arises as to whether a once per revolution tacho reference signal is needed to measure phase. Is it possible to get phase if we only have a speed signal? This note gives some insight into those questions.

Actually the question that should be asked is – “Can we measure a meaningful phase, for use in vibration monitoring, if we only have a speed signal as well as the vibration signals?”

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