We present an experimental investigation of a single-plane automatic balancer that is fitted to a rigid rotor. Two balls, which are free to travel around a circular race, are used to compensate for the mass imbalance in the plane of the device. The experimental rig possesses both cylindrical and conical rigid body modes and the performance of the automatic balancer is assessed for a variety of different levels of imbalance. A non-planar mathematical model that also includes the observed effect of support anisotropy is developed and numerical simulations are compared with the experimental findings. In the highly supercritical frequency range the balls act to balance the rotor and a good quantitative match is found between the model and the experimental data. However, during the rigid body resonances the dynamics of the ball balancer is highly nonlinear and for this speed range the agreement between theory and experiment is mainly qualitative. Nevertheless, the model is able to successfully reproduce many of the solution types that are found experimentally.
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