Improved design of a bladed hydraulic balance ring

The hydraulic self-balance ring is a very well-known kind of passive balancer of widespread use in the home appliances industry. Its conventional design consists of a hollow ring equipped with a number of anti-sloshing baffle boards of mainly straight shape situated inside the cavity. This paper introduces for the first time a hydraulic balance ring with curved baffles or blades. It is found that the forward blade shape is more suited to improve the transient-state response, whereas the backward blade shape remarkably enhances the steady-state response. A classical dynamics model of this novel bladed balance ring design is developed. Experimental data showing good correlation between the model and tests is also presented.