Wheel Balancing Machine Design

The goal of the Wheel Balancing Machine Design project was to introduce students to designing mechanical systems in the ETME475-Mechanical Systems Design course. Project was completed in stages as a laboratory requirement for the course. The machine consists of a frame, an electric motor, a belt driven shaft on two spherical bearings, an anchoring system to attach the wheel to the shaft, and associated instrumentation. Instrumentation is used to: (a) measure the amount of the force caused by the non-uniform distribution of wheel mass, (b) convert it to an equivalent counterweight mass to be placed on the wheel rim to balance the wheel, and (c) find the angular position on the rim where the mass needs to be placed. A shaft encoder is used to measure the angular position and an accelerometer is used to measure the angular acceleration due to unbalance force on the wheel. A PC based data acquisition system with ASYST software was used for data acquisition, analysis and display. Due to some mechanical and instrumentation related technical difficulties, this fairly complicated class project turned out to be an applied research project. These technical problems were dealt one at a time.