Automatic Ball Balancer Using Permanent Magnets to Reduce Transient Vibration

The conventional automatic ball balancer (ABB) reduces the mass unbalance of a rotating body by locating balls to the opposite side, thereby suppressing the steady-state vibration. However, the transient vibration increases due to rotating balls in such a way that they increase the mass unbalance before moving to the opposite side of the mass unbalance. We propose an ABB using permanent magnets (APM) that reduces the vibration of a rotating system, not only in the steady state but also in the transient state. The proposed APM is composed of four balls and two permanent magnets attached to a conventional ABB system. We designed the permanent magnets of the APM by using the multi-physics finite-element software COMSOL. We investigated the behavior of the rotating balls and the vibration suppression due to the APM by using the multi-body dynamic program ADAMS to validate the effectiveness of the proposed APM.