Section curve reconstruction and mean-camber curve extraction of a point-sampled blade surface

PLoS One. 2014 Dec 31;9(12):e115471. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0115471. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

The blade is one of the most critical parts of an aviation engine, and a small change in the blade geometry may significantly affect the dynamics performance of the aviation engine. Rapid advancements in 3D scanning techniques have enabled the inspection of the blade shape using a dense and accurate point cloud. This paper proposes a new method to achieving two common tasks in blade inspection: section curve reconstruction and mean-camber curve extraction with the representation of a point cloud. The mathematical morphology is expanded and applied to restrain the effect of the measuring defects and generate an ordered sequence of 2D measured points in the section plane. Then, the energy and distance are minimized to iteratively smoothen the measured points, approximate the section curve and extract the mean-camber curve. In addition, a turbine blade is machined and scanned to observe the curvature variation, energy variation and approximation error, which demonstrates the availability of the proposed method. The proposed method is simple to implement and can be applied in aviation casting-blade finish inspection, large forging-blade allowance inspection and visual-guided robot grinding localization.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Aircraft / instrumentation*
  • Equipment Failure
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Quality Control
  • Surface Properties

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51475187, 51275192 and 51421062) and the National Key Projects (Grant No. 2014ZX04001051-05). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.