Why is a balance section required in the design of compressors in general?

Reduce vibration – China does a poor job in this area; several compressors are prone to resonance

This post was last edited by Yan Qiusheng on 2010-11-30 09:40. The balance section of the compressor serves to generate the force of the balance piston. Compressors are generally designed to maintain balance of piston forces through the arrangement of cylinders. If the arrangement of the cylinders in a symmetrically balanced compressor is symmetrical, then a balancing section is not required. However, if the cylinder arrangement is asymmetric and the piston forces are unbalanced, a balancing section is necessary to achieve balance; otherwise, there will be a significant imbalance in the piston forces, and vibrations will occur during the compressor’s operation. In recent years, some new models of nitrogen-hydrogen compressors designed specifically for ammonia production have adopted a symmetrically balanced configuration with a single row of cylinders per cylinder bank, eliminating the balance section. With such a design, the various sections are properly sealed, which eliminates the problems of internal leakage in the compressor, as well as the low efficiency and high power consumption resulting from repeated compression and transportation of gas. This improves the gas delivery capacity of the compressor and yields significant energy savings. Such as the 6M model with six-stage compression.

Our company has modified some of its compressors by removing the balance section, and as a result, the production capacity can indeed increase by about 15%.

The balance section is designed to balance the piston force, but it causes cyclic compression of the gas, resulting in the compressor performing futile work. Our company improved the compressor’s production capacity by about 10% by rearranging the cylinders to balance the piston forces.