Harmonic balancing of planar machinery by arbitrarily placed counterweighing shafts

The paper proposes a new method to neutralize the shaking force and shaking moment exerted on its supporting structure by a one-degree-of-freedom machine whose non-stationary parts move parallel to the same plane. Differently from the well-known technique that takes advantage of two counterweighing shafts for each of the harmonic components of the frame excitation that has to be counteracted, the proposed method requires three shafts per harmonic component. This seemingly additional complexity is offset by the complete freedom of selection of the shaft axis positions, a feature not enjoyed by the classical two-shaft device. An example shows application of the proposed method to a four-cylinder in-line engine. Copyright © 2007 by ASME.