Advanced mechatronic technology for turbine blades maintenance

Turbine blades requiring regular and certified repair and maintenance cycles. An advanced maintenance system for turbine blades based on a multi-axis high-speed milling center with reverse engineering devices enables adaptive reshaping of blades with individual geometries due to the functional requirements. In order to perform the repair procedure as automatically as possible, an adaptive milling technique was applied. The principle of the adaptive milling for the repair purpose is to generate a milling path for a turbine blade geometry and modify it for a damaged blade according to the geometrical information provided by the 3D sensors. The RTD work performed to reach these goals are are outlined. The authors discuss the simulation and verification of multi-axis milling processes, 3D shape measurement, and the milling reference model.