Engine balance

Engine balance refers to those factors in the design, production, engine tuning, maintenance and the operation of an engine that benefit from being balanced. Major considerations are:

This article is currently limited to structural and operational balance within an engine in general, and balancing of piston engine components in particular.

Piston engine balancing is a complicated subject that covers many areas in the design, production, tuning and operation. The engine considered to be well balanced in a particular usage may produce unacceptable level of vibration in another usage for the difference in driven mass and mounting method, and slight variations in resonant frequencies of the environment and engine parts could be big factors in throwing a smooth operation off balance. In addition to the vast areas that need to be covered and the delicate nature, terminologies commonly used to describe engine balance are often incorrectly understood and/or poorly defined not only in casual discussions but also in many articles in respected publications.

Internal combustion piston engines, by definition, are converter devices to transform energy in intermittent combustion into energy in mechanical motion. A slider-crank mechanism is used in creating a chemical reaction on fuel with air (compression and ignition), and converting the energy into rotation (expansion). The intermittent energy source combined with the nature of this mechanism make the engine naturally vibration-prone. Multi-cylinder configuration and many of the engine design elements are reflections of the effort to reduce vibrations through the act of balancing.

This article is organized in six sections:

There are many factors that can contribute to engine imbalance, and there are many ways to categorize them. The following categories will be used for the purposes of this discussion. In the category descriptions, 'Phase' refers to the timing on the rotation of crankshaft, 'Plane' refers to the location on the crankshaft rotating axis, and 'CG' refers to the center of gravity.

In contrast to the causes of imbalance listed above, effects of imbalance mainly appear as vibration. There are three major types of vibration caused by engine imbalances:

A single cylinder, 360°-crank parallel twin, or a 180°-crank inline-3 engine normally vibrates up and down because there are no counter-moving piston(s) or there is a mismatch in the number of counter-moving pistons. This is a 3. phase imbalance of reciprocating mass.

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