Study of applying reverse engineering to turbine blade manufacture

A turbine blade has complex shaped free-form surfaces that can be modelled as surfaces with variable curvature by high-degree polynomials. Industry typically utilizes a turnkey system and special-purpose machine tool to manufacture turbine blades. A turkey system is a closed form design. Users need only input relevant data to this system to manufacture the product directly. However, users are unaware of the internal operation of the system. With rapidly advances in computing technology, commercial CAD/CAM systems can be utilized to design freeform surfaces and generate a tool path for the designed surfaces. This study uses a reverse engineering technology that is used to reconstruct the CAD model for a turbine blade. The prototype is measured by a coordinate measuring machine to obtain the geometrical control data points that are used to generate the CAD model in the UniGraphics (UG) CAD/CAM system. The UG/GRIP (GRaphics Interactive Programming) language is used to generate the cutter location data rather than using the default UG CAM module. A five-axis NC code is acquired by the developed postprocessor and verified by the solid cutting simulation software VERICUT (R). Real turbine blade machining is performed on a table/spindle tilting five-axis machine tool, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.