Valid8 Turbine Inspection

Erodex have developed a completely innovative machine that addresses key measurement problems that are inherent to the manufacture of turbine blades, nozzle guide vanes and segments. The project goals are aimed at improving product safety within the Aerospace and Industrial Gas Turbine industries by offering automated, extremely accurate and repeatable scientific solutions to current inspection pain points, whilst improving efficiency by driving down the current TAKT times associated with manual methods currently used. Many manufacturers of turbine components suffer from inspection bottle necks, and can incur significant costs in manual inspection activities, and sub-contracting of such activities. The Erodex invention has been named Valid8.

Valid8 uses robotic, tele-centric, fibre optic, vision and automation technology to check cooling hole geometry, which is currently done using manual pin gauges. Components can have 400 cooling holes each, which makes pin gauging a very labour intensive, and scientifically restricted method. There is also risk of human error associated with this method, with lack of concentration leading to errors, and missed cooling holes.

The Valid8 uses robotic, laser and vision technology to check seal slot geometry and position with an average TAKT time reduced to 25% of traditional CMM measurement methods.

Coating checks are traditionally destructive, so visual inspection must be carried out on components that will be assembled in aircraft. This is again a very subject method, which is open to variables such as inspector integrity, beliefs, understanding and training levels. Valid8 uses constant integrity light sources and vision technology to assess coating condition of turbines components, highlighting issues such as lightly coated areas, scratches, chips, contamination and process spatter. Our solution offers an extremely repeatable and automated check to remove subjectivity from the process and reduce checking times.

Valid8 also includes an automated solution to back wall impingement, experienced by turbine blade manufacturers when an electrode travels too far into a core. This is currently another manual check in a typical process.

The final stage of this project is a collaboration between Erodex and the NPL to outline a standard for these types of measurements, that Erodex and the industry as a whole can use for validating equipment designed for these very unique components. On completion of this project Erodex believe that the turbine industry will benefit from increased efficiency and product safety of their processes and products respectively.