Virtual Throat Inspection for Gas Turbine Vane Assembly
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Solution Overview
Problem
The manufacturing process of gas turbine engine vanes often results in throat areas that deviate from the ideal design, leading to suboptimal engine performance due to arbitrary selection of vane components, which can lead to discarded vanes and reduced efficiency.
Innovation Solution
A method involving virtual analysis of three-dimensional representations of vane components to predict optimal combinations, align mating surfaces, and calculate virtual throat areas before physical assembly, ensuring closer alignment to nominal throat areas.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Manufacturing precision
If arbitrary selection of vane components is used in manufacturing, then manufacturing process is simple, but throat area deviates from ideal design leading to suboptimal engine performance
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs virtual analysis and prediction of throat areas for multiple potential vane combinations before physical assembly. By pre-calculating which combinations will achieve the ideal throat area, the system eliminates the need for trial-and-error physical assembly, thus improving throat area accuracy without proportionally increasing manufacturing complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates virtual copies (three-dimensional representations) of physical vane components and performs analysis on these digital models. This allows throat area prediction and optimization to be conducted in the virtual domain, avoiding the complexity of physical trial assemblies while achieving precise throat area control in the final product.
2Reliability
If arbitrary selection of vane components is used, then assembly process is fast, but number of unusable vanes increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary virtual analysis to identify which vane component combinations will achieve the ideal throat area before physical assembly begins. This pre-screening ensures that only usable combinations are selected for assembly, eliminating the need to discard vanes assembled from inappropriate components, thus improving reliability without significantly reducing productivity.
3Manufacturing precision
If multiple vane component combinations are analyzed, then optimal throat area is achieved, but computational time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses virtual copies of vane components for computational analysis instead of physical prototypes. This digital modeling approach allows rapid calculation of throat areas for multiple combinations without the time cost of physical assembly and measurement, achieving precise throat area prediction while minimizing computational and physical time investment.
Data Source
AI summary
An improved manufacturing method includes virtually aligning scanned virtual vane components that are virtual electronic counterparts of separately manufactured and three-dimensionally scanned physical vane components used in gas turbine engines. The improved method performs virtual alignments for any of various possible virtual combinations of the virtual vane components to predict how their physical counterparts would likely behave in combination with each other before those physical counterparts are inseparably combined. One or more optimal virtual combinations are identified, in turn indicating optimal physical combinations to select to form physical vanes incorporated into one or more gas turbine engines, in turn improving the quality of the vanes and ultimately engine performance.