The need for bore alignment applies across a wide variety of industrial sectors including the marine industry,  energy, oil and gas, chemical and service companies. It is used to determine the centerline of a series of bores, and setting the centerline relative to any fixed reference, or aligning the bores to a rotating shaft, and/or determining out-of-roundness of bores. One common example is the alignment of large gas and steam turbines. However, one problem often encountered with performing laser alignment on large turbines is that over long distances and long measurement periods, laser stability is subject to be impacted by variations in air density, temperature or light, the cumulative effect of which is often referred to as “laser drift”. To ensure measurement accuracy, an additional fixed sensor, called a control sensor, can be installed to monitor the amount of laser drift at the far end of the turbine. When used with the CENTRALIGN ULTRA EXPERT application, the laser drift data from the control sensor is automatically applied to the bore measurements taken by the measurement sensor to provide true bore center measurements under any conditions over longer periods of time.

Figure 1: Control Sensor being used at a recent CENTRALIGN ULTRA Expert Training
Figure 1: Control Sensor being used at a recent CENTRALIGN ULTRA EXPERT Training

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, by Tim Rogers CRL