Study on the influence of friction in an automatic ball balancing system

This study aims to investigate the influence of friction in an automatic ball balancing system. A precise kinetic model is presented for a commercial optical disk drive with an automatic ball balancer. The equations of motion, with the effects of frictional and driving forces taken into account, are derived based on this model. To investigate the influence of friction on the dynamic behavior of the system, different friction coefficients and initial ball positions were considered and the equations were solved numerically with a commercial software package, Matlab. The results do not only indicate that friction prevents the ball from reaching the desired positions to automatically balance the system but also reveal that the balls can be set into oscillation in steady state. Finally, experiments are designed and carried out to verify the theoretical analysis.