BROKEN AREA MODELING FOR REPAIR AUTOMATION.

Current repairing process for worn-out blades and blisks of aeroengines and industrial gas turbines is highly manual, labor experience-based and hence error-prone. It requires more sophisticated CNC-driven laser equipment to replace manual welding for the repair. This paper presents an innovative strategy that will lead to the automation of laser welding and cladding. The project makes use of reverse engineering techniques to capture the geometric shape of the broken area by a digitized point cloud and nominal geometry. The core software technologies include four aspects: (i) point-to-surface-best-fitting technology that puts the point cloud coordinate system nominal CAD coordinate system, (ii) a procedure to extract a broken boundary that automatically separates the broken area and the unbroken area, (iii) geometric model representation for the broken area, and (iv) generation of a STL file to drive CNC laser machine. The tool has been implemented with UG API. Some experimental results have shown that the presented strategy is efficient for repair automation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]