Heuristic methods for arranging blades to minimize rotor unbalance

Rotor unbalance in turbomachinery is minimized by allocating rotor blades to specific circumferential positions on the disk or drum according to some fixed allocation scheme. In this paper implementations of various combinatorial optimization heuristics for the rotor unbalance problem are discussed. Their performances in terms of computer time and quality of solution are compared. Real data are used for the comparison. Conclusions are drawn on the method most likely to produce a good solution in practice.