Case study 1: Eliminating unwanted vibrations during the development of a production machine

This first example illustrates a typical approach to dealing with the late appearance of vibration-related problems in the product development process.

These were pneumatic tools of the orbital sander type, intended for professional use, but nevertheless produced in fairly large series.

While the prototypes had shown perfectly normal vibratory behavior for this type of equipment, it soon became apparent during series production that more than half of the tooling produced was unusable due to excessive vibration, and had to be scrapped. That's when we were called in, with all the urgency you can imagine.

The first test was to check the quality of the balancing of the rotating part. It appeared that a significant gain could be achieved by replacing the previous static balancing with dynamic balancing in two planes (figure...