SBIR-STTR Award

The airfoil components of modern turbines and engines are highly complex critical parts where accurate and detailed geometry knowledge is required for manufacturing and maintenance. Commercially available metrology systems use contact (touch) probes that are slow and inefficient to inspect the complex profiles inherent to airfoils. Current non-contact (optical) systems operate at significantly faster speeds, but are also challenged by high-curvature surfaces and in addition suffer from edges/signal effects such as attenuation and glare. Furthermore, because airfoils have features with sizes similar in magnitude to the location tolerance with respect to the overall part datum planes, multi-pass measurements are often necessary to achieve desired accuracy, leading to slower inspection times. Well-suited to address these challenges is the Automated Integrated Technology (AIM) system, a recently-commercialized, non-contact technology that rapidly measures surface shapes precisely (accuracies 25,000 measurements/second ) and can be deployed as a stand-alone system or integrated into existing CNCs. The proposed research will quantify the accuracy and potential speed improvements achievable by extending the AIM technology to airfoil metrology

Benefit:
The immediate commercial benefit of this system will be significant reduction in time required to inspect and/or qualify high value, highly complex airfoil components for manufacturing and maintenance purposes. The overall goal of this project is to achieve at least a 90% reduction over current practices (often 10 hours or more) for Integrally Bladed Rotors (IBRs) and Bladed Disks (blisks) to an hour or less. In addition to IBRs, we envision that this system will have broader applications in manufacturing practices, allowing a wide variety of work pieces to be inspected with similar accuracies and throughputs. Successful demonstration of this technology would lead to an ubiquity similar to that of touch probes, and will provide significant cost savings in a wide variety of manufacturing and maintenance applications.

Keywords:
IBR, IBR, blisk, airfoil, adaptive metrology, AIM(TM), non-contact scanning, laser measurement