Automatic Virtual Metrology and Deformation Fusion Scheme for Engine-Case Manufacturing

Industry 4.0 paves the way to smart factory through integrating Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, cloud manufacturing, and big data analytics for various industrial fields. Especially, the machinery industry significantly benefits from these automation techniques in machine-tool quality inspection, cutting-tool remaining-useful-life, surface roughness prediction, etc. However, these innovation technologies are still not executable in the aerospace-component production due to their complex machining conditions, which result in long metrology delays and severe component deformations. To overcome these two challenges of the aerospace industry, this letter proposes to apply the automatic virtual metrology (AVM) system to successfully convert sampling inspections with metrology delay into real-time and online total inspection and to utilize the so-called deformation fusion (DF) scheme for dealing with the component-deformation problem. The application of the flange operation of aerospace engine-case manufacturing is adopted to illustrate the performance of the AVM-plus-DF approach.