Crankshaft Balancing Design Platform: A Practical Application

The modern industrial environment is continuously changing and striving to innovate its process and methods. This is especially true for complex design procedures, such as the balancing of the crankshaft of internal combustion engines. In fact, as usual in most mechanical applications, conflicting design requirements are at play. On one hand, to maximise efficiency weight and friction losses must be minimised. On the other hand, user comfort and components’ structural integrity must be guaranteed. In this context, a new tool that enables a faster and more cost-effective design process for achieving a balancing configuration has been developed. Such methodology, which allows to meet the design requirements previously outlined, makes use of multiple computational tools integrated in a user-friendly platform. This work presents the results from said design process. In particular the numerical and graphical results obtained through the design platform will be reported and discussed. Therefore, showcasing what a designer could expect to find during the development of the balancing configuration and demonstrating the capability of this platform to enable a progressive design process towards the final solution.