Advanced Next Generation Inspection System (NGIS III)

The industry consortium was organized to team with the Cherry Point Naval Aviation Depot to develop a production ready pilot exploiting technology, and experience, developed under NGIS I & II.  Both are previously completed NCMS Collaborative efforts to develop new and improved technologies to support on the machine inspection. The projects targeted the need to provide dimensional measurement, and on-the-fly scanning of surfaces, capability at high speed both in a CMM and on-machine environment with multiple, interchangeable sensors.  

Cherry Point NADEP studied potential applications with best payoff. They identified grinding and inspecting operations required for the repair of a family of parts including blisks, impellers, and individual compressor blades used on the T-64, T-58 and other similar technology engines. These components are critical to both engine performance and flight safety.

Airfoil surface damage, incurred in service and normally concentrated in the at the blade edge, is repaired by adding weld material to the damaged area and then hand grinding (blending the excess weld material) to achieve a precise surface.  This operation currently is strictly a hand operation and relies heavily on operator skill.  The close tolerances required, using manual control, often results in the removal of parent material requiring a repeat of the weld, blend cycle and an occasional lost part if the parent metal is too deeply gouged.  The surface is manually checked using various templates. 

The project team has worked to design and build an a automated cell to provide the multi-axis grinding, and precise on machine measuring capability to reduce cycle times, and scrap risks associated with the current hand blending process. After field operation, the individual blades are not necessarily in nominal, or as designed, positions.   The cell will have the capability to map the surface and location of each individual blade. Then generate a NC Program to control the multi-axis machining of the repair weld material to less than .005 of the final dimension, and perform, and record, final inspection of the blade surface. Specific benefits targeted include an average 60% reduction at Cherry Point in the labor hours and cycle time for the sample parts for the benching and hand grinding from the current times, and the ability to rapidly acquire process data to enable tracking of process trends, and quality history. The system is also capable of processing individual compressor blades mounted in a fixture.

Program Manager: Bill Waddell (231) 264 9774, wwadd49648@chartermi.net