Review of Literature on Rotor Balancing

While the necessity of rotor balancing was demonstrated by Jeffcott in his classic paper [68], published in 1919, the first significant contributions to the rotor balancing literature did not appear until about 1930. Prior to the 1950s, the balancing literature was concerned with the balancing of rigid rotors and, in a few cases, very simple flexible ones. There is no documentation during this period of any systematic balancing procedure using more than two balancing planes. The first flexible rotors of significance to be built were steam turbine rotors. Initially, these rotors were balanced using simple, rigid-rotor procedures. However, as these rotors became more flexible, and were often operated supercritically, the existing balancing procedures became inadequate. This led to the development of a number of balancing methods specifically designed for flexible rotors.