Measuring the profile of aircraft engine blades using spectral confocal sensors

Abstract

The geometric parameters of aircraft engine blades need to be precisely measured to ensure the quality of the blades for the normal operation of aircraft engines. This study aims to address the challenges of existing measurement systems in balancing efficiency, accuracy, and completeness. Additionally, it aims to enhance the accuracy and robustness of the algorithm for extracting blade profile characteristic parameters. In this paper, a spectral confocal sensor is employed to establish a blade profile measurement system. The design includes a probe sampling strategy, and a standard ball is used to calibrate the sensor probe’s light emission direction and the precise rotation center of the turntable. The paper proposes the use of methods such as partition search algorithm, binary search, and curvature segmentation to process point cloud data of blade body and tenon. We have conducted experimental measurements on the blades of an aircraft engine. The acquired three-dimensional point cloud data of multiple sets of blade cross-sections and dovetail sections were processed. After calculation, the maximum measurement errors for chord length, maximum blade thickness, tenon width, bottom height, top angle, and bottom angle are −0.0036 mm, −0.00721 mm, −0.0102 mm, −0.00928 mm, 0.0086°, and −0.0058°, respectively. This process validates the effectiveness of the proposed method and has high measurement accuracy. Compared with the CMM method, this method is more accurate in measuring small pits and large curvature micro surfaces, with higher measurement integrity and higher measurement efficiency.