Whirl Tower Increases Productivity and Efficiency
One of the world’s largest helicopter companies came to us with a challenge – design and build a new kind of blade balance stand. It needed to handle blades from multiple manufacturers, have greater availability in the challenging environment of its desert location, and improve overall productivity. The customer required a Blade Balance Stand capable of dynamically balancing a wide variety of helicopter blades in difficult environmental conditions.
RedViking designed and built a unique whirl tower/blade balance stand to handle helicopter rotor blades from multiple OEMs. An enclosure was designed to improve and maintain the testing capability in a desert environment.
Key Benefits:
- 0-400 RPM
- Tests Blades in Lengths From 12’ – 36’
- 5800 Continuous Duty HP
- Dual Blade Lift for Increased Productivity
- Isolated Gearbox
- Integrated Test Machine and Rotor Head Automatic Controls
- Advanced Laser Blade Position Measurement
- Automatic Handrails
- Remote Camera Control
- Remote Safety and Material Handling Pendants
Custom Whirl Tower Enclosure for Desert Environment
As specialists in flexible systems design, we developed an extensive range of rotary balancing capabilities to handle current and future requirements. The RedViking Blade Balance Stand is also designed to monitor operating conditions of the gearbox tower structure, which isolates the gearbox from potentially harmful loads to significantly improve test stand gearbox life. A weatherproof, air-conditioned enclosure allows the whirl tower to operate in difficult testing environments under which most systems would not function.
Dual Helicopter Blade Lift Design Improves Productivity
The stand includes a dual blade lift device, allowing a blade to be unloaded and a new blade loaded in a single operation, reducing changeover time and improving productivity. The stand includes a Rotor Head specifically designed for dynamic blade balancing.
RedViking software is utilized to incorporate blade control, speed, and blade measurements into one comprehensive package, greatly reducing operator training requirements and improving accuracy.
Torque Measurement and Blade History Tracking
An optional RedViking Whirl Tower component, Error Proofing, can be provided through an instrumented torque gun to provide reliable, historical data for bolt torques. Together with our fully integrated control system, this provides the ability for advanced data analysis and tracking.
The RedViking Blade Balance Stand saves time and money, improves productivity, and provides better data analysis than has previously been possible.
