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Accurate model construction of deformed aero-engine blades for remanufacturing

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Abstract

Remanufacturing for aero-engine blades is an essential operation in current aerospace maintenance industry due to the significant cost savings involved. However, the individual geometric deformation in the damaged blades makes it very difficult to repair them automatically due to the lack of a model for the deformed blade. This paper proposes a new method to adaptively construct an accurate deformed blade model for remanufacturing by finding the deformation rule between the nominal blade model and the measured data collected from the deformed blade via scanning. Considering the precision of the scanned data, the flat regions of the scanned data and nominal model (suction face and pressure face) are segmented and extracted first. To achieve accurate matching results, the segmented scanned data are matched with the segmented nominal model by maintaining local rigidity under the optimal ICP (iterative closest point) framework. Then, the nonflat regions of the nominal model (leading edge and trailing edge as well as the damaged region) are stitched with the scanned data at selected fixed locations to construct the deformed blade model. A twisted compressor blade with some tip damage was selected in the case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. A reference deformed blade model acquired by a computational fluid dynamics software tool was utilized for comparison, and machining simulation was carried out to verify the remanufacturing result.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to Dr. Jack S.-S. Chen of UBC for his assistance in generating the machining simulation result using CutRight.

Funding

This work has been supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFB1107402) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11290141). The support provided by the China Scholarship Council (Grant No. 201706020096) to sponsor the 1-year visit of Cheng Su to the University of British Columbia (UBC) is also gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LMIB and School of Mathematics and Systems Science, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Cheng Su, Xin Jiang, Guanying Huo & Zhiming Zheng

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Cheng Su, Qiang Zou & Hsi-Yung Feng

  3. Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Xin Jiang & Guanying Huo

  4. Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, 518055, Guangdong, China

    Xin Jiang & Guanying Huo

Authors
  1. Cheng Su
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  2. Xin Jiang
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  3. Guanying Huo
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  4. Qiang Zou
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  5. Zhiming Zheng
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  6. Hsi-Yung Feng
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xin Jiang or Guanying Huo.

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The research does not involve human participants and/or animals. Consent to submit the paper for publication has been received explicitly from all co-authors.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Su, C., Jiang, X., Huo, G. et al. Accurate model construction of deformed aero-engine blades for remanufacturing. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 106, 3239–3251 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-019-04688-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-019-04688-w

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