Improvements with Balance Bearings

Balanced rotors are essential for the optimum operation of machinery, especially those requiring high-precision measurement and fast operations. Without proper rotor balancing, machinery does not operate correctly upon installation and results in rotors that have high vibrations, which can lead to failures.

Achieving and maintaining good balance is essential to keep machinery running smoothly. New Way’s^® Balance Bearings are designed to support rotor-bearing operations and are significantly better than hard rollers for achieving consistent balance. The air bearings provide a more precise axis of rotation with a cleaner signal for higher resolution balancing. The air gap created with the externally-pressurized gas bearings eliminate potential damage, common with a hard roller, as well as the mess of oil-film bearings. Because gas bearings don’t make contact with the rotor, they don’t damage the bearing surface. This eliminates ‘scrapping the project’ at the final balancing stages not to mention costly scheduling delays.

New Way Externally-Pressurized Gas Bearings for rotor balancing provide for:

• Reduction of mechanical, audible and electrical noise in balancing operations for both hard and soft balancing machines. Low noise results in a consistent clean signal with each revolution, allowing for a finer resolution in balancing.
• A better axis of rotation improves rotor balancing. A rotor supported on rollers experiences some axial forces from roller misalignment that reduce balance resolution.

Balance Bearings are easily retrofitted into existing low-speed balance machines using New Way “bolt-on” hardware that implements the same mounting features as original hard rollers. A snap-on/snap-off feature allows for varying sizes of bearing pads to be easily switched out on balancing machines, enabling operators to easily balance rotors with different journal sizes without adjusting or plumbing air into the bearings.

To see them in action, check out the YouTube video. Or visit the New Way web site.