SOLUTION METHODS FOR THE BALANCING OF JET TURBINES

Turbine balancing is an important and regular maintenance operation at airline companies. As a result of manufacturing inaccuracies, variati ons occur in the weights of the blades that can, in turn, lead to sign ificant out-of-balance forces on the engine. The overall time required for balancing can be decreased significantly if the best placement of turbine blades is first determined mathematically. This problem is fo rmulated as a variation of the quadratic assignment problem and a numb er of solution schemes are investigated. A neighbourhood search algori thm is found to outperform the other solution approaches significantly when applied to data from a major South Pacific airline. The neighbou rhood search algorithm can be combined with various strategies to init ialize starting points. The use of starting points obtained from a Lag rangean dual scheme is shown to improve results for large problems. Co pyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd