Abstract
The UK is home to several major air commercial and transport hubs. As a result, there is a high demand for Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) services to ensure that fleets of aircraft are in airworthy conditions. MRO services currently involve heavy manual labor. This creates bottlenecks, low repeatability, and low productivity. Presented in this paper is an investigation to create an automation cell for the fan-blade reconditioning component of MRO. The design and prototype of the automation cell is presented. Furthermore, a digital twin of the grinding process is developed and used as a tool to explore the required grinding force parameters needed to effectively remove surface material. An integration of a 6-DoF industrial robot with an end-effector grinder and a computer vision system was undertaken. The computer vision system was used for the digitization of the fan-blade surface as well as tracking and guidance of material removal. Our findings reveal that our proposed system can perform material removal, track the state of the fan blade during the reconditioning process and do so within a closed-loop automated robotic work cell.
Highlights
The demand for manufacturing systems that enable the Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO)of aircraft is increasing
To ensure that surface operations during the fan-blade reconditioning are done right the first time, we propose the use of a digital twin
We explored how to automate material removal during fan-blade reconditioning
Summary
The demand for manufacturing systems that enable the Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO). The use of industrial robotic solutions coupled with recent advances in sensing, digitization, and digital twins provide a way forward for future automated MRO systems The development of such automated systems, requires an understanding of the current reconditioning process in order to understand the visual sensory processes used by engineers, the knowledge used by the engineers to determine the grinding force to apply to the blade as well as the fine-tuning used by the engineer during grinding [5,6,7]. In included the the contact contact force between the part and the abrasive tool being used, feed rate, depth of cut, the speed of the force between the part and the abrasive tool being used, feed rate, depth of cut, the speed of the rotating end-effector and its machining path These process parameters affect the final surface quality.
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