Aero Propulsion and Power Technology

Components can suffer High Cycle Fatigue failures that are induced by minute dimensional variations between seemingly identical items. For instance, some blades in a gas turbine engine disk will resonate at a certain operating condition while others won't. The AF has thus identified a need to accurately measure dimensions and contours of complex geometries, especially blisks, so that the blade to blade variations can be characterized and their vibrational response determined by Finite Element Analysis. The goal of the proposed effort is to find, develop and assemble the hardware, software and methodology to automatically, quickly and accurately inspect individual turbine engine blades and blisks. The inspection machine, which will be the deliverable from the Phase II program, will be capable of quickly and accurately scanning and creating a high-resolution point cloud. This data will then be measured, compared and analyzed against the original component design dimensions in order to identify areas of deviation, which as stated above lead to mistuning and other variations in forced response. The laser scanner based machine will be capable of 5 axes simultaneous movement, utilize Delta Tau Open Architecture CNC control and measure to an accuracy of 0.001 inch.