Abstract

Rotational systems are widely used in industrial application and its monitoring can improve production and decrease stop times of machines, for example. In industry these kind of problem is, in general, solved using a vibration meter and a phase meter in order to obtain the necessary data to correct the rotor unbalancing. This work presents the development of a computational application, using LabVIEW, for improving the measure of unbalancing in a rotational system. The application developed in this work proposes that the phase and vibration be digitally measured. The idea is to use a piezoelectric accelerometer to measure vibration intensity and an inductive sensor to replace the phase meter. An algorithm to calculate phase angle is also described. With the application developed we can replace a vibrometer by a PC compatible computer that can calculate the unbalancing of a rotor too. In order to evaluate the results a test bench composed by a DC motor (1585 rpm and 0.19 HP) coupled to a shaft made of steel with a rotor on it, were assembled. In the test bench we simulated an unbalancing rotor and use the application to calculate the balancing mass and its phase angle. Preliminaries results shown a good agreement between the real mass and phase angle and the one calculated by the application.

Key words: Rotational systems, unbalancing, LabVIEW, instrumentation.